


If He Stays

by Slanguage



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Car Accident, Coma, F/M, Family, Hospital, Love, M/M, Minor Character Death, Romance, Sad, Temporary Character Death, Tragedy, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 22:26:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1916202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slanguage/pseuds/Slanguage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by the novel “If I Stay” by Gayle Forman.</p><p>~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~</p><p>Castiel Novak’s world ends with the accident. Kind of.</p><p>Stuck in an in-between, Castiel is set to wander unseen as his body falls into a coma in the ICU, watching on the sidelines as his life falls apart. He is faced with the grief of losing his three siblings in the crash, and he must decide for himself whether he is going to hold onto the shambles of his life, or if he is going to pass on and be with them.</p><p>Boyfriend Dean Winchester, however, although oblivious to Castiel’s astral projection, is determined to convince Castiel to stay. But will it be enough?</p><p>Castiel’s time is running out, and, soon, he must choose if he passes on, or if he stays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The End of All Things

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends! This story is inspired by the novel "If I Stay" by Gayle Forman. 
> 
> Warnings: Minor Character Death, Temporary Character Death.
> 
> Enjoy!

“Dean, we are not getting a dog.”

“You’re only saying that because you want a cat,” Dean argued, “but we can’t get one, because I’m allergic.”

It was true, but Castiel rarely allowed himself to be petty, so he had decided to grant himself this one immaturity. “I’m sure there is some medication you can take.”

“Can we still get a dog, if we get a cat?” Dean pressured, and Cas was sure that his boyfriend would have been giving him a pleading expression if they were in the same room, to which Castiel would have folded to in an instant. Cas could currently not be more grateful for cell phones and timing, because Dean was stuck at work and Cas could convince himself that Dean did not need a dog when he couldn’t see his own love’s puppy eyes.

“Maybe,” Cas said despite his best wishes, sighing as he struggled to pull on his winter hat with one hand, his gloves tucked down the front of his jeans.

“Oh, come on, Cas! You told me you thought the husky was cute!”

“I think you’re cute,” Cas said, “and, apparently, you were a mistake.”

“Aw, Cas, baby, don’t be like that.”

Cas couldn’t help but to laugh, feeling his resolve falling in a little, knowing he couldn’t deny Dean something he really wanted and was passionate about. It was the whole reason he was in Portland, Oregon, working with Sam at a firm called Talbot & Walker instead of at the one that offered him a much better deal in Boston, Massachusetts. Dean’s face had lit up when Cas had told him about the Portland offer, and deflated when he heard the Boston one was better. Castiel was stubborn and strong-willed, but he would bend over backwards if it made Dean smile.

And, it turned out, Cas couldn’t have been happier about his decision to work here. Dean had found a job at a motor company, and he was climbing the ranks fast due to his insane expertise on the subject. Castiel was a big name in the city for his work in automobile accidents, especially those that result in fatalities. It’s not everything, not like prosecuting criminals, but Cas still felt happy when he can help a family reach peace the best way he can.

Dean and Sam were the only ones that knew Cas was attempting to get a job with the D.A. and work for the state in prosecution. Nothing was finalized, however, so that way it would stay until they got word back either way.

It was the happiest Castiel had been in his life.

“Balthazar coming to pick you up?” Dean asked as Cas unknotted his scarf with one hand.

“Yup, him and the whole caravan,” Castiel enlightened him, and then sighed heavily. “We had to pick the one city where our entire family lives in, right?”

“Oh, shut up,” Dean told him, laughing. “You love them.”

“I do,” Cas admitted, sighing, but he was smiling. “I love you, too, you freeloader.”

“Hey, I work!” Dean objected just as the sound of Bobby’s gruff voice barked something on his side of the line, and Dean cursed in surprise. Cas laughed as Dean muttered something back to his surrogate father that sounded like _Keep your beard on, old man, I’m hanging up_ , before he turned back to their conversation. “Sorry, Cas. Duty calls.”

“I’ll see you at home. Probably late.”

“I’ll see you then,” Dean replied, and Cas’s chest warmed at the sound of the voice that Dean only used around him, something soft and loving that took Castiel’s breath away from day one, and he added, “I love you so much, more than anything—you know that?”

“I know that,” Cas confirmed, smiling wide. “I guess I love you too, you assbutt nuisance. Sometimes. On a good day.”

“You wound me,” Dean told him, scoffing. “Have fun with your siblings.”

“Goodbye, Dean.”

“Bye, Cas.”

Cas ended the call and put his cell phone in his pocket, tying his scarf around his neck before rummaging down his pants for his gloves and nearly tripping over his own two feet in fright when there was a sudden loud blaring sound of a horn from outside that echoed through the house like a foghorn warning boats away from the rocks.

Castiel grabbed for his trench coat and shrugged it on, putting his hands in its pockets and bringing it closer around himself. He checked around the front room of the home for a moment, mentally checking down a list of things he needed to grab, and he only reached for the doorknob when he was sure he wasn’t forgetting anything, looking up at the front door.

Tucked in between the door and the wall, by the doorway, was an index card in Dean’s handwriting that read, _I love you_.

Cas broke into a wide, childishly deliriously happy grin, reaching out and tracing the words. He spend a moment just looking at the note, reveling in the feel of joy and happiness that spread through his chest with the vigor of a contagion, smiling until it felt like his face would crack apart with the pressure the same way diamonds are carved, and it was moments like those where Castiel Novak remembered how he had never loved someone as totally and fiercely and fearlessly as he loved Dean Winchester.

It had been seven years, and Castiel still loved Dean so much.

The horn blared again, and Castiel managed to snap out of his daze long enough to stuff the note in his pocket and duck out of the door, bowing his head against the unforgiving winter chill as he locked up behind him, and shuffled through the building snow to the familiar SUV lingering in the driveway, his impatient older brother staring out of the windshield at him while his two sisters smirked at him from the passenger side, the front and the back seats. Castiel rolled his eyes as he climbed into the backseat behind Balthazar, huffing.

“I heard you the first time, you know,” he told his brother, perhaps a little rudely, but Balthazar had the tendency to be no better, so he wasn’t stooping too low. And, lo and behold, Balthazar took the time to shoot him in acidic glare before he backed carefully out of the driveway, shaking his head in disproval.

“You’re a menace, Cassie,” Balthazar muttered, rolling his eyes, but Cas was already forgiven. Cas caught Anna’s eye from the seat beside him, and they simultaneously rolled their eyes at the behavior of the older Novak. Hael just kept grinning her amusement from the front seat, not commenting. “How’s that boy toy of yours?”

“He’s fine, currently at work,” Cas explained, putting on his seatbelt automatically, a creature ruled by habit. “I’m sure he still wouldn’t want to come with us even if he wasn’t.”

Anna couldn’t help it anymore—she burst into laughter, and Hael’s giggles followed soon after. Balthazar just scoffed.

“Boy toy thinks his beauty will get him out of bonding time with the in-laws,” Balthazar continued to scoff jokingly, but Castiel knew that Balthazar was secretly pleased that the three siblings were able to get him alone on occasions just for themselves. “I do give him kudos for letting you drag his scrumptious ass back home.”

“Agreed,” Hael and Anna both chimed, and all four of the siblings couldn’t help but to laugh.

Castiel and Dean had met when Cas was in law school, twenty-three with something to prove, and he had met a fellow student a year younger than him and taking the same classes, a boy who was naturally brilliant and named Sam Winchester, Dean’s younger brother and practically his pride and joy, not counting Dean’s car. Cas and Sam had gone out to drinks one night when his mechanic-by-day, bartender-by-night brother had appeared out of the woodwork with a smirk that could have coaxed a nun to lose her panties and a charm that belonged in another world, and Castiel was smitten by the first meeting. And damn if Dean Winchester hadn’t known that as well as he did.

Thankfully, the feeling had been mutual, and Dean had been loyal enough to follow Cas anywhere around the globe, as long as it meant they would be together. It was a loyalty he had only before shown to his little brother, and Dean’s reluctant acceptance to leave his brother to his own faculties to be with Cas had only increased his love for him. But Cas didn’t choose Portland for Dean Winchester, or Sam, or for his own siblings. He chose it because he wanted to.

Castiel was not entirely selfish. He knew when not to be. And he chose Portland because he himself wanted him to, and not because all of the people around him had wanted him to.

Granted, that _had_ made his choice a little easier to ultimately decide on, but Cas was always strong when he held his own.

Except for when it came for the bimonthly family fun trips that his siblings had been trapping him in for years. Castiel wished he could have been able to hold firm enough to deny his availability, but he found himself agreeing to silly ideas of theirs for daytrips for the last two years, and Castiel couldn’t help but to secretly enjoy them.

Even if it was kind of like Stockholm Syndrome.

Castiel had grown up in a small Oregon town about forty-five minutes south of Portland, where Hael and Balthazar both still lived and worked. Cas had chosen to go to Stanford for both undergrad and postgrad, to the stress of his siblings, but he and Dean had managed to find a nice, comfortable three-bedroom house outside of Portland and two well-paying jobs to keep them in the city, and his siblings all seemed willing to compromise.

Anna was a new mother of twins with her husband Inias, the three of which were always left behind in Gresham when these days arose. She and Cas were the closest siblings—understandable, as they were twins themselves—and they were the two that mostly just were in this to make the others happy. As the youngest siblings on the Novak family tree, they were always bending over backwards in an attempt to make their siblings happy.

Hael was one year older than them and remained unmarried and, as she put it, unattached. Balthazar was three years older than her and has slept with so many people that Castiel has lost count, but the last he remembered it was somewhere in the low hundreds.

They had another brother, an older brother. They didn’t like to talk about him if they couldn’t help it.

“So where are we going today?” Cas asked, glancing out the window as they passed the city by, suburbs flying by and thinning as they crawled further and further away. Balthazar sighed like he was disappointed in his younger brother, glancing up to shoot him a judgmental gaze through the rearview mirror.

“You must make a lousy lawyer with that memory, Cassie,” Balthazar chided.   
“Mount Hood, my most basic of all siblings. We are going to go freeze our asses off at the top of the mountain and I will hear none of your backtalk.”

Castiel let out a low whine of displeasure, never a big fan of the snow and cold despite his coordinates, and Anna looked out the window to hide her smile, reaching over and squeezing his hand instead.

Hael unhooked her seatbelt to turn around her seat, looking at Anna, and said, “Now—tell me everything there is to know about darling little Alfie and Hester. Spare no details on their cuteness. Auntie Hael wants to know everything.”

Anna laughed, but obliged.

Castiel leaned his head against the window and smiled as his twin launched into numerous stories about her young children, barely even three months old but still somehow developing their own personalities and quirks, and Anna was in the middle of telling her siblings about how Alfie keeps trying to climb over the side of his crib by using his little red and white blanket as a ladder when everything went wrong.

One second, Cas was looking at his twin sister, admiring her for her strength, and then all he could feel was his stomach turning and the sound of screeching brakes and Hael screaming and Balthazar yelling and pain, and then he was twisted and everything hurt and he knew, Castiel _knew_ , and somehow he remembered thinking to himself that he had never meant for his goodbye to Dean on the phone to mean forever, that he would have said so much more if he had known, and then he passed out, feeling as though he was drowning in burning pain and blood, and he didn’t think he would ever wake up.

 

**+24:00:00**

Jessica Moore was Sam Winchester’s fiancée since before she even graduated from Stanford. She was a kind young woman with bright eyes and thick, curly blonde hair. She had been graduating to be a nurse, and she’d been about to enter training to be a paramedic. She had decided that she would rather be in the rush of the moment on the scene rather than in the same white halls, working tirelessly to juggle dozens of patients, and that she would rather in the moment, in the rush. Sam had, at first, been skeptical, but he came around and supported her wholly, and Dean and Castiel had cheered her on from the sidelines. Sometimes, she thought that she never would have even made it this far if she hadn’t had those three there, telling her she could do it, keeping her morale up. When she wasn’t working as a medic, she was working as an Emergency Room nurse, and the rush was able to keep her going so quickly that the days flew by in the best possible days.

But, some days, there were scenes that just slowed everything down. This was one of those days.

She worked for a hospital in the city outside of the metropolitan area, but she was working as a medic when the radio call came in, and Andy, who was driving, immediately turned the lights on and stepped on the gas when they gained news of a fatal crash less than a ten minute drive away. Jess had immediately climbed into the back and prepared the bags, not knowing what to expect, not knowing how much her life could change in only a few moments.

She and Andy made it to the scene in five minutes. They were the third ambulance to appear, and her breath caught the moment they caught sight of the scene, the truck slamming to a stop as Andy cursed harshly under his breath. The two automobiles, one a car and the other an SUV, were pieces of twisted, broken metal. There was blood staining the snow where the glass was not, and there were bodies what felt like everywhere.

Jess had seen some horrible scenes, but, sometimes, they stayed with you. This would be one of them.

She jumped out of the truck as quickly as she could, clutching her supplies, and sprinted into the scene, yelling to some of the police to ask where she was needed, and she was immediately pointed to the end of the SUV, which had been pinned between the car and the tree in which it had collided into. Jess rushed to where she was pointed, feeling sickening sadness at the site of the SUV’s shattered windshield, and the two covered bodies several feet before it.

The worst accidents were always the ones where seatbelts weren’t worn. They hadn’t stood a chance.

“Jess!” a familiar fellow medic, Max, called from the body that he and Jake, Lily, and Ava were crowded around, securing limbs and reinforcing blood flow in the stinging cold. Max continued to yell, “I need you to feed this one oxygen!”

“Right there!” Jess called back, rushing through adrenaline to fall to her knees beside him, reaching out and taking the oxygen pump from him, squeezing her hands habitually and rhythmically to fill the victim’s lungs. “Anyone else?”

“The black car’s driver is already in an ambulance, probably the best off,” Max filled her in hurriedly, inserting an IV and waiting for the stretcher, his eyes darting around to look for it. “Another female victim from this car was just put into another one. Looked like she had hit her head pretty hard. Blood everywhere. This one is failing.”

Jess opened her mouth to ask another question, but she looked down at the victim who she was pumping oxygen into, and her breath suddenly caught. Panic rose in her chest to the point that she herself couldn’t breathe, and she was thankful for her training that she was able to keep his own breath going in and out of his lungs.

Lying before her, bloodied and clothes torn and skin much too pale, was Castiel Novak, her fiancé’s best friend, and her to-be brother-in-law’s love of his life.

“Cas?” she whispered, horrified, and then screamed, “Oh my god, _Cas_!”

“Jess?” Andy demanded, falling to his knees beside her, and grabbing the oxygen from her, not even looking away from her face. She stumbled back a few steps, her hands covering up to cover her mouth in horror. She felt like she was numb with nothing but horror and panic, and she felt like she was about to throw up. Professionalism went out the window, apparently, when one was looking down and one of their close friends, and watching them die. “Jess, what’s wrong?”

“Castiel?” Jess whimpered, and then she glanced toward the other bodies. She was shaking. And, somehow, she knew. “Jake,” she whispered shakily, “there were three in the SUV?”

“Jess?” Andy asked as Jake replied, confused, “Yes.”

“Oh god,” Jess said, horrified. “Oh god, no. No, no, no.”

Before she could be stopped, or questioned, she reluctantly broke away from Castiel’s side and ran to the covered bodies, her hands shaking, so many questions and unanswered circumstances running through her mind, so many horrible scenarios, and she couldn’t even process the relief of not knowing the car before she fell to her knees beside the smaller victim, pulling back the blanket to glimpse the face, and saw the destroyed form of Hael Novak.

“No, no, no, no,” she whispered over and over as she scrambled over to the other, and she found Balthazar Novak.

Andy suddenly appeared behind her and gripped her, turning her around, and Jess didn’t realize she was shaking and crying until she realized he was blurred, and that she was having trouble breathing. He gripped at her, hard, eyes wide and panicked.

“Jess,” he demanded, “what is going on?”

“I know them,” she heaved, feeling like she was tumbling to pieces. “Oh, god, that’s my brother-in-law’s boyfriend and his brother and sister, oh my god, Andy—”

“Jake and Max are loading him into theirs,” Andy informed her, gripping hard. “We have to get going. Should we take him to ours?”

She nodded, numb, not even knowing what he was asking, not even knowing what she was answering. He just nodded back, the both of them so used to dealing with grief that it was mechanical, and he shoved her in the direction of Jake and Max’s truck, urging her to go.

“Go with them,” he told her when she didn’t move, feeling rooted to the spot. “We’ve got another two coming. Go, Jess.”

Jess didn’t think. She couldn’t think. She ran on autopilot.

So, she climbed into the ambulance beside the pale, unresponsive body of a failing Castiel, Jake pressing oxygen into his lungs and watching to make sure his heart didn’t fail, and she realized that she was praying for the first time since her mother died as they roared away from the scene, heading for the hospital.

She had no idea that a version of Castiel Novak was beside her, clinging to the back door, screaming, “What is going on? Jess? Anna? Where are my siblings? Jess, _where are my siblings_?”

She never heard anything. It just made Castiel more tired, and more restless, and he sunk into a horrible dark at around the same time that his heart began to fail.

 

**+23:43:28**

 

As Castiel was rolled into surgery, filled with tubes and surrounded by EMTs attempting to keep his heart going, Jess stumbled off, watching him disappear behind a set of doors before she managed to find the nearest nurse’s station, the same one she worked three days at a week, and she scrambled for the phone, her fingers slipping on the numbers so much that she had to ask another nurse to type them for her. She shakily pressed the receiver to her ear, her breath coming out too loud and fast, but she didn’t have time to stop and be calm.

All she could see were the mangled bodies of two people she had seen at various occasions for years and would call kind acquaintances, loved siblings of Cas’s. All she could see was Cas on the freezing ground, in the back of the ambulance as he didn’t respond, her hands pounding heartbeats back into his body, his body rejecting them like it knew the terrors he was going to face when he woke up.

All she could think of was her own grief, and how horrible Sam’s would be. All she could think about was how this news was going to break Dean, and she could barely stay standing with the thought, the pain nearly bringing her to her knees.

“Jess?” Sam answered, sounding confused but pleased, and Jess’s stomach flipped at the sound of her fiancé’s voice, so oblivious to the way everything was about to change. “I thought you were acting as medical genius with Andy today?”

“Sam,” Jess said, but her voice was rough and her voice broke, weighed down with tears. Immediately, she felt the atmosphere shift.

“Jess?” Sam demanded, panicked. “Jess, what’s wrong? What happened?”

“Sam, it’s Cas,” Jess whimpered, the words ripping through her chest like knives. “He’s—he’s hurt so bad, Sam, I got called to an accident, and there was so much blood, and the cars were destroyed, and Balthazar and Hael were dead, and Cas stopped breathing and he flat-lined in the ambulance, and I can’t do this alone, Sam, I don’t know how to tell Dean, I have to call him, what am I going to do—”

“I’m on my way,” Sam said, his voice flat, but there was panic in the undertone, like he wanted to start screaming. Jess knew something about that feeling. “Do you—should I call Dean?”

“I’ll do it,” Jess told him shakily, taking hulking deep breaths that tore through her entire body. “I—I can do it. Just—hurry.”

“I’m on my way, sweetheart,” Sam told her, his voice suddenly shaking, and she knew he was crying, which made new tears roll down her face. “I’ll be there as fast as I can, okay? I love you and I’ll see you in a few minutes, okay?”

“Be safe, Sam,” she whimpered, wishing him her love in return before she sent the receiver crashing down on the base, her shaking hand unable to keep hold of it for much longer. She reached up and rubbed her face, rubbing away the tears, before she took a deep breath and picked up the receiver again, and slowly pressed in Dean’s number.

Castiel hovered, hazy, behind her, stirred to a strange, non-corporeal, unreal version of himself planted in reality, and he blinked in awareness, hearing the same name vibrating again and again in his own mind: _Dean._

Jess swallowed hard as the sound of Dean’s voice answered the phone on the other line, bringing Cas a little bit closer to the surface from where he hovered by Jess, lost and hazy and confused, so confused, and Jess said, “Dean? Dean, it’s Cas.”

Cas drifted into nothing again, losing hold of himself, and he hoped it would be for the last time.

 

**+23:27:54**

 

Castiel flickered, fully aware, into existence next to an operating table. He looked down, seeing himself lying before him, but not understand how it was possible. Castiel blinked against the bright light and the tension of the room as the doctors ducked in his midsection, in the middle of something important that Castiel didn’t understand, a lawyer and not a medicine man, even as much as Jess had once attempted to teach him about it. Castiel flinched away from the goings-on, backing away nervously from the table, panic once again rising in his chest. He looked around wildly, his head spinning, everything feeling like it was rushing around his ears as he looked into something that was impossible.

“Hello?” he asked, and none of the doctors or nurses acknowledged him. The only movement he received was one of the doctors taking a deep breath, and a nurse reaching up to reposition her mask. “Hello? Can anyone hear me? Are any of you listening?”

Still, no movement, no acknowledgement. Cas walked over and hit one of the doctors on the shoulder, probably not the best idea, since his hand was cutting something open somewhere in Cas’s midsection, but Cas’s hand just passed through like he was a cloud. Castiel stared down at his hand, his eyes widening, and he felt the same panicked anxiety rising in his throat.

“Hello?” he yelled, louder. Nothing happened.

Castiel let out a desperate sound before stumbling through the doors to the operating room, rushing through the hallway, feeling real but no one was looking at his when he passed, none of them moved out of the way as he narrowly escaped from colliding into them. Castiel took a ragged breath, looking around, so confused, just wanting to find out what had happened, just wanting to find his siblings. Castiel just wanted someone to notice him, to listen to him.

Something was wrong. He knew that the same way he knew his name. Something was wrong.

Castiel careened into the waiting room, and he immediately spotted someone familiar.

Jess was crying, her shoulders shaking, her head buried into Sam’s chest. Sam was pale, his eyes a little red around the edges, his face drawn tight in stress and worry as he held Jess hard to his body, looking like he was going to be sick but like he couldn’t break down in front of her. Cas immediately let out a breath, relieved, before he changed his course to approach him, Sam’s eyes not catching on him as he approached and, really, Cas was beginning not to expect them to.

He was beginning to understand without explanation, but that was making it even more discombobulating. Somehow, Castiel was beginning to understand that he was real and not, some kind of projection of himself outside of his body that he couldn’t explain, and he couldn’t escape.

“Sam,” Cas said, relieved, and even though Sam couldn’t hear him, he felt a little better to see a familiar face. “Sam, man, you have to help me out here. I think something’s wrong. I’m not right. Where’s Anna and Balthazar and Hael? Are they okay? Where is Dean?”

Cas wasn’t really expecting Sam to answer him, what with the trend of no one actually seeing him, but he still couldn’t help but to feel crushing disappointment and helplessness when Sam looked straight through him, looking to the door to the hospital, waiting for something like a man walking to the gallows.

Dean burst through the door, tearstained and stricken, and Cas understood.

“Dean,” Sam murmured, prying Jess off of him, and he took a step forward, his eyes on his older brother, a man that he had always admired even since they were children and Dean had done a better job at raising him than their own father. As if Dean had an internal compass that pointed straight to Sammy’s location, Dean’s head snapped over, and he met his brother’s eyes, Castiel watching invisible and curious. And then Dean crumpled, right before his eyes, and Castiel hoped that this was all one horrible dream, that it was his overactive imagination giving him the images of a nightmare, because Dean Winchester had never visibly broken. He was made of strong stuff. Dean didn’t just come apart like that.

But he was. The second he saw his brother and his devastation, the second he saw Jess and her tears, the second he seemed to realize it was all too real, Dean Winchester shattered into a million pieces, and Castiel didn’t know if he would ever be properly repaired.

Dean’s tears were horrible, earth-shattering as he looked at his brother, his expression a broken, burning man’s, his shoulders slumping in a defeat greater than mankind may have ever known. Cas watched, unable to move, unable to help, as Dean walked forward one heavy step, and then another, like his limbs were concrete. Like each step was another chunk of his life breaking apart in front of his very eyes.

Castiel wanted to take him into his arms. He wanted to hold him close and to whisper that everything was okay, the same way he had done when John Winchester had died, when they found out the news and when they stood at the funeral. Cas had dried Dean’s tears and had allowed him to yell when he found out about his half-brother. Cas had been there to heal him, always only wanting Dean to have all of the good that he deserved, even if the man did not think he deserved so much.

“Dean?” Cas asked, feeling his heart breaking.

Sam caught Dean before he crashed into the ground, grabbing his brother and holding him hard, gripping onto his jacket to keep him standing. Dean, lost, let Sam hold him, looking like he couldn’t feel a thing.

“What happened?” Dean whispered, and the whisper seemed to shatter everything. Sam flinched, and Jess muffled the noise that escaped from her mouth, something like a pained whimper. Dean didn’t pay either of their reactions any mind, not even seeming to notice as he pulled away from his little brother, looking between Sam and Jess desperately. “What happened to him, Sam?”

“Dean, I’m so sorry,” Jess whispered, moving forward to reach toward him comfortingly, but Dean flinched away from her, so she let her hand drop, realizing Dean Winchester was different when it came to his grief. “He’s in surgery right now—we don’t know anything new. There was an accident, a little bit out of town. It looks like a car skidded and hit their car, and it sent them into a tree.”

“Their car?” Dean asked, and then horrified realization washed over his face, and his eyes widened. “Are they okay? Are they in this hospital?”

“Anna is in another hospital,” Jess allowed gently. Cas looked at her, not liking her tone.

Dean didn’t, either, because he straightened up when he turned to look at her, and his voice was a little more flat when he demanded, “And Balthazar? Hael?”

Jess didn’t say anything for a moment, glancing to Sam first, as if to assure through him that they both believed that Dean could handle the news she was about to hand to them. Castiel, though, had seen that look before. He had seen it the first time Anna had miscarried a baby, and he had seen it when their mother had withered away from breast cancer. He had shared the same expression with Anna when the police had asked how their father had ended up in the hospital the time that Castiel had had to use a knife to defend himself against his abusive fists.

Castiel knew before she said it, but he felt the earth below his feet crumble and send him falling when she whispered, “They didn’t make it, Dean. They were DOA.”

Dead on Arrival. Probably even dead on impact.

Cas heard the sound of screeching metal, of Hael screaming, in the back of his mind. He reached his hands up, gripping at his hair, trying desperately to shake it away. He gasped in mouthfuls of air, feeling the same devastation but so much worse than when he had heard the news about his mother.

“Oh, God, Cas,” Dean whimpered, his hands reaching up to cover his mouth in horror for a moment before he let them fall, shaking, back to his sides. “Is he going to be alright? Anna?”

“I don’t know anything about Anna,” Jess admitted softly, swallowing hard. “She’s in a different hospital, and I only know before my partner, Andy, went with her. Castiel—I don’t know, Dean. It’s touch and go. We started to lose him in the ambulance, but he hung on for long enough that we got him here, and they know to find us if something goes wrong.”

“He’s going to be okay, right?” Dean asked brokenly, his voice breaking at the end as tears welled. Sam and Jess looked at each other, not knowing how to answer, and then sharply looked away. Castiel couldn’t breathe as Dean’s face fell, desperate. “Right?”

“I don’t know, Dean,” Sam whispered, closing his eyes. Tears fell. Dean Winchester was destroyed just a little bit more in that moment, because Sam, even the most emotional of the brothers, had always been able to bite back his tears when he could.

Sam was already grieving, and Dean saw that. It made him lose even more hope, made him hurt even more.

Castiel wanted to reach for him, but he didn’t want to feel how bad it would hurt when his hand just passed straight through him, so he stood, making no noise and observing silently from the side, as Dean looked away, tears overflowing down his cheeks, reaching both of his hands up to grip at his hair.

Sam guided Dean to crumple in one of the waiting room chairs in just enough time for Dean to start sobbing, so scared, so helpless. And Castiel could do nothing but watch.

If there was a God, Castiel couldn’t help to think sourly, then he sure was cruel.

 

**+22:34:56**

 

Eventually, Castiel could no longer stand over Dean, Sam, and Jess, holding his own silently invisible vigil, not knowing what was happening to him but seeming to guess. Somehow, he knew he was having some ridiculous-seeming out-of-body experience, but it seemed so simple, so unexplainable. He didn’t see anyone else standing around, not seen, but he didn’t need to. He knew he was real, drifting through the seconds that ticked away. Castiel was getting restless, standing there, knowing nothing. He figured that, if he was going to be invisible, he might as well fill in the missing pieces of his very disorienting puzzle.

The knowledge that Hael and Balthazar were dead was a missile of mass destruction that hadn’t seemed to have sunk in yet, to which Cas was almost thankful. He didn’t know if he could handle something so devastating when he was already trying to wrap his head around being able to look down and see his own body on the stretcher in front of him, leaving the sides of his friends and the man he loved more than anything in the world to go and pace the hallways until he found himself, and then Castiel followed his body as they moved it into the ICU, his heart beating slowly and painfully.

Castiel didn’t know what the surgery was for. He didn’t really want to know.

His body looked like he was chiseled out of white marble, like he would be cold and hard to the touch, and he had to be dying, looking like that. The nurses were treating him like he may break, covering his wounds with bandages and replacing them when they were too bloodied. They smoothed over his forehead, his face uninjured except for a cut along his hairline, and they touched him carefully, murmuring kind words to him as they did. Cas watched them, wishing for one of them to notice him, but they all just did their rounds, and they moved on. Castiel didn’t know how long he stood there, not getting any news, not knowing what was wrong with his own body.

And then, a woman showed up, a doctor with a long white coat, pale skin, black hair cut to her shoulders, and hazel eyes. She picked up his chart as a nurse hovered behind her, another woman with dark hair and eyes that were so light they were almost white, and she absentmindedly tucked Castiel’s blankets tighter around him, patting his hand.

“Fell into a coma during surgery,” the doctor said softly, almost to herself. The nurse looked down at Cas’s body, frowning pityingly, and checked his blankets again. “He’s hanging on by a thread, but he’s still hanging on. Poor guy. Car crash.”

“His sister-in-law is a friend of mine, a medic and nurse in the ER,” the woman informed the doctor. “Her name is Jessica. Sweetest girl. Her, her beau, and his brother—this handsome lad’s other half—are devastated. He was in the car with his siblings. Two of them DOA.”

“Poor guy,” the doctor murmured sympathetically, and then sighed heavily, tapping at the clipboard. “Should we go tell them about the coma now?”

“Sure,” the nurse said, checking some readings, and then said, “Wait for me, alright, Tessa?”

“Okay,” the doctor said before she slipped away, still reading the clipboard.

Cas’s eyes slipped from her to the nurse, who was fixing his pillow, and he bent closer and watched as she leaned even closer to him, to speak into his ear, and he heard it as if in amplified sound.

“I know you’re still hanging around here, sweetie,” she murmured softly, and Cas’s skin broke into an electrical charge. He leaned forward eagerly. “They think I’m crazy sometimes, but _I_ think I’m psychic, and I can feel you hanging around. And I can’t tell you what to do, Castiel, and I can’t tell you how to think, but this whole thing? This is all your choice. You can keep hanging on, and you can fight, or you can just let go. It’s your decision, honey. You can go, or you can stay. It won’t be easy for you to stay—broken bones, and you hit your head, and all of the people you’ve lost—but it’s up to you. Only you can decide your fate. Some people would call it that—fate. I call it free will.

“Good luck, gorgeous,” the nurse murmured before straightening up, casting Castiel’s body one more pitying but meaningful look, before she turned and walked back to the doctor. Intrigued, and feeling a little sick, Cas wandered behind her, wondering what else she would have to say.

“You still talk to them, Pamela?” the doctor, Tessa, asked, seeming a little amused but so much more sad, and Pamela shrugged before she smiled at Tessa, a wicked gleam in her eyes that reminded Castiel something of happiness.

“Someone has to,” Pamela said, and shrugged again.

Tessa seemed to accept that, because she flipped the clipboard back into place at Castiel’s bed-front and turned to walk in the direction of the elevators, Pamela following dutifully behind, Cas following behind her because he didn’t know what else to do, and he watched the elevator doors slip shut, sending the three of them into silence alone, before Tessa whispered, “Thank you for that.”

“I have a feeling that one is gonna need someone to believe in,” Pamela told Tessa right before the doors opened, and Castiel followed them to Sam, Dean, and Jess, feeling numb and thinking, on repeat, _It’s your decision, honey. You can go,_

_or you can stay._

Castiel didn’t think it would ever be a choice, no matter what he lost. But, then, he was proven wrong.

 

**+21:45:25**

 

“What if he doesn’t wake up?” Dean whispered.

“He will,” Sam replied confidently, but Castiel was sure it was for show. “He’s gonna be fine, Dean. Cas is tough.”

“I want to go in and see him.”

“I know, Dean, but he’s too unstable right now. They want to see how he reacts to the surgery first. They’re already pulling strings because we aren’t family.”

“We _are_ family,” Dean said, looking up at his brother helplessly. “Cas is family.”

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam said, choking up, and Jess looked away so they couldn’t see her tears. “I know.”

 

**+20:09:21**

 

“Can I go in and see him?” Dean asked the second he spotted the doctor. Tessa shook her head at him sadly.

“Sorry, Mr. Winchester,” she said. “Not quite yet. It’s still touch and go.”

“Is he going to be okay?” Dean asked for what felt like the millionth time, and Cas hovered as close to him as he dared, feeling hopeless. There was something in Tessa’s eyes that Castiel didn’t like. It felt, to him, like acceptance.

“I don’t know,” Tessa told him, and then excused herself to go back to her patients.

 

**+19:25:23**

 

“I don’t understand why they aren’t talking to me.”

“I think,” Jess whispered, “they don’t know what to say.”

That shut Dean up.

 

**+18:54:34**

 

Jess’s cell phone rang, and they all turned to glance at it, all of them numb from a lack of events and a lack of news, all of them sitting dull and restless all at once, none of them knowing what to do with themselves in the traitorously slow drag of time passing by. Jess checked the ID before she accepted the call and held her phone to her ear, greeting with, “Andy?”

“Jess,” Andy said on the other line, Castiel hovering close enough that he heard everything. “You know the other victim from the accident?”

He didn’t have to clarify. Jess immediately said yes, so hopeful, so optimistic, so believing in the power of medicine and human nature to fight against ills that she never expected the punch it would pack.

“Anna Milton just died on the table,” Andy told her, sounding sad. “Her husband is here. Do you want to talk to him?”

Jess closed her eyes. Castiel couldn’t dream of moving, too rooted to the spot, horror and grief seeping into his limbs. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t necessarily have to breathe, because he couldn’t even be sure his heart was even bothering to beat.

Anna was his twin sister. His other half. She was his best friend, his sister, heart and soul. She was the only person that could keep him sane, and she was the only person he trusted with everything, and vice versa. They lived and breathed in time with each other since the womb, since she didn’t start crying until their mother gave birth to Castiel a minute and a half after her.

Anna was gone, and the world stopped revolving around the sun. The world could have flown straight _into_ the sun, for all Castiel would have noticed, his entire world crumbling to dust around him in that very moment, worse than fallen apart.

She was gone. They were all gone.

Castiel was alone.

“Yeah,” Jess said, fresh tears biting at her eyes, and she turned to look at Sam and Dean, not even bothering to hide her pain and fear. “Put him on.”

Castiel fell into the familiar dark before he could hear Inias’s devastation. He didn’t even know if he would have been able to hear it over the sound of his own heart shattering.

 

**+18:24:43**

 

 


	2. Stories in the Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on the song "Stories in the Dark" by Paradise Fears. Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HetsSYUraKg

When Cas and Anna were children, they used to sit in the dark, and she used to tell him stories.

She had a vivid imagination, and she had aspired to be a writer of novels before she got pregnant the first disastrous time and had dropped the idea temporarily to focus on motherhood instead. Some nights it would be horror stories, meant to terrorize him and keep him awake, but he would have never admitted to her that they scared him. She told him stories like fairy tales, but new, and stories where she was the princess and he was the prince and how they would both rule kingdoms. Her favorite stories to tell had been about angels that loved humans, and fell from grace for humanity, and how they were more of an angel when they landed than they had been when they lived in the stars. It had been Cas’s favorite, too.

Anna was always lying and making things up and distorting the truth. It used to drive their father insane, and it used to make their eldest brother, Gabriel, laugh like none other. Cas hadn’t seen Gabriel since their mother’s funeral. He hadn’t even bothered to show up to their father’s.

Balthazar had thought her stories ridiculous, had rolled his eyes at them, but he had mussed her hair and encouraged her to think of them, to tell them anyway, despite what he thought, because he wanted her to be all that she could, and she could tell stories so well that it would have been cruel to take that away from her. Hael used to sit through the rough drafts, would help Anna tweak them and make them flow. Castiel used to be the lucky one that got to listen to the final, polished draft, and Anna had never told a story that didn’t grip and engage him. She never told a story that he didn’t love.

He sat over his body, watching it breathe, and wondering what kind of stories she would have been sitting there and telling him now if circumstances had been different. If she had stayed home with her kids instead, if she had been called to the hospital and was forced to wait to be allowed inside to sit over his body, she would have told him the stories about the angels, and she would have told him that, even if he didn’t believe God would save him, then maybe an angel would.

Castiel sat over his fragile blood and bones and skin now, his consciousness some kind of mist in the wind, stuck in some kind of astral projection, and Castiel wondered how great it must feel like to believe so deeply and strongly in something that it doesn’t occur to them to doubt faith. He could barely comprehend how people had believed in something so supreme for years without ever having seen it with their own two eyes.

He wondered if the angels in the stories would have known God.

He knew that the angels, certainly, would have found his love for one human endearing. They would have found him intriguing. Maybe he would have been one of the angels that fell, hurtling toward the earth, knowing that his heart was in the hands of a mortal being, like a star falling across the patterns in the sky.

Castiel wondered if it would have hurt, and then figured that it probably would have been worth it.

 

**+17:29:05**

 

“He’s not going to wake up,” Dean said calmly, resolute. “He’s not going to stay if Anna didn’t.”

“I don’t think that would change his opinion, even if he did know.”

“If you think that,” Dean told Sam slowly, “then maybe you didn’t know him after all.”

Jess looked between them, but did not comment.

**+17:03:45**

 

“Dean?” Tessa called to him and, when he looked up, gestured for him to follow her. He flew out of his chair eagerly, knowing what she was communicating, and Sam and Jess sent him meaningful looks as he scampered away, willing to give anything to spend a few minutes of time with Castiel. Castiel hovered half a step behind Tessa, feeling numb, knowing what he was going to do after this moment.

He had to see Dean one more time. He had to listen to Dean talk to him, just to him, once more. And then Castiel knew what he was going to do. He knew what he _had_ to do.

He couldn’t hang on anymore. He just had to hear this one last goodbye.

“You can’t stay with him long,” Tessa told him easily, watching him closely, just as ready as Castiel was to try to hold up the pieces of a falling, broken man. “This is special treatment already, considering the circumstances, but I can give you ten minutes. Is that okay?”

“Thank you,” Dean whispered, wrecked but so truly grateful, and Cas’s heart hurt for him. Tessa smiled at Dean kindly, obviously looking at this man and thinking he might lose the love of his life. Castiel wanted to tell her to stop, but he figured that she knew a thing or two more about this kind of situation than he did. Maybe she knew the odds, and she knew Dean wouldn’t like them, so she just chose not to say it with words. Maybe this was her way of easing Dean into acceptance.

Tessa didn’t know Dean like Cas did. She had no idea that he was so stubborn, so quick to deny. He would refuse to believe the inevitable until he was staring it in the face, and then he would spit at it for good measure.

Dean Winchester didn’t believe in the harshness of fate and choice until he was looking at the end result like broken pieces of a mirror shattered into a sink, and he realized what all of it meant.

Dean would be destroyed like that broken mirror, but Sam would piece his older brother together; he would save him. He would have jagged edges, but he would heal, and he would move on and find someone who wouldn’t be as damaged as Castiel if he held on. Dean would be okay. He wouldn’t think that he was, but he _would_ be.

Castiel felt like it was a lie, but he couldn’t let himself tell it any differently.

The elevator dinged, and Tessa waved Dean to where Castiel’s body laid, covered in tubes and needles, a large tube shoved down his throat, the mask taped to his face. The machine was breathing for him, and his heart rate was low. His body was hanging on, but it wasn’t fighting. It was just lying there, waiting for the astral projection of its consciousness to make its decision. And he had. But he needed one more closure.

Dean’s breath caught sharply when he spotted Castiel’s battered body, his face falling. Cas wondered what he had been expecting. Cas wondered if this image would haunt Dean forever, the last that he had ever seen of the man he loved so fearlessly and truly and so consuming, and Castiel began to regret his selfishness to see Dean again.

He should have just chosen to go when he had heard about Anna. He should have just let them exit the world as the twins that they are—were. She should have drifted away, and he should have followed behind her, as poetic a full circle as he could. She entered the world first, and she left it first. He should have followed right behind her the same way he always had.

But he wanted to hold on. He wanted to say goodbye.

Dean took tentative steps to Castiel’s bedside before sinking into the chair beside him, his knees shaking too hard to keep him standing. Tessa paused, as if making sure Dean wasn’t going to start screaming, before she nodded once and stepped away, moving to the other side of the large ICU room to give them the disguise of privacy.

Dean swallowed hard, his throat clicking. Castiel settled down in a seat on the other side of the bed, watching Dean as Dean watched his body, pausing before he reached out and laid his hand over Cas’s. Cas flexed his fingers, wishing desperately that he could feel Dean’s skin on his, and, if he focused hard enough, he thought he might be able to feel a slight tingle, like nerves buzzing. Dean looked down at their hands for a moment before he looked back up at Cas’s bruised, masked face, and there were tears in his eyes.

“Cas, baby, look at you,” Dean whispered, reaching out another shaking hand to touch Castiel’s cheek, and Cas swallowed dryly, his own eyes starting to mist, and all he could think of was Dean—the way he left the note telling Cas that he loved him that morning, thinking of the way Dean had been trying to wheedle him into getting a dog for the last week, thinking about the way Dean had stood with Cas over his father’s grave and told him he was happy he was dead, because Dean couldn’t be truly happy with his father’s threats out in the open. Castiel remembered what it was like to wake up next to Dean, to have Dean smile at him, to have Dean loving him, and Castiel felt his tears begin to fall as he thought about how he was going to let it all go to waste, how he was going to abandon making more of those memories, just because it was too painful for him. Because he couldn’t do it.

Cas was a coward, and he knew it. He so, so knew it.

“I love you,” Dean told him, his voice cracking, and he took his hand from Castiel’s face to wipe hurriedly at his tears. “I love you so fucking much. I wish I would have stayed in bed this morning, baby, wished we could have both skipped what we had to do and just laid there with each other, because how could we have known this was how the day would end? Who the hell would have guessed how much a day was worth? I never thought it would mean this much. I never thought that a day could take you away, if it wanted. If you wanted.”

Castiel looked up at Dean, surprised.

“I think that you know they’re gone,” Dean whispered shakily. “Balthazar and Hael and now Anna. I think you know, somehow. And I don’t blame you for wanting to let go, baby. I was halfway to killing myself before I met you. You saw the scars on my arms, my legs. You knew that I would have torn myself to pieces if I could have, because I hated myself. But you put me back together, Cas, piece by piece. You took every part of myself that I had thrown away and fused it back into me, and I used those pieces to love you, and I—I thought I was going to break apart when I heard the news. Like I could spontaneously combust, or like little pieces of myself were going to flake away and everything that you touched about me would be gone and I would be left with nothing. I guess that’s how I still feel. You’re not okay, yet. You still have some dangerous waters to get through, and I’m so afraid that you’re just going to give up, because you loved them so much. I love you that much, Cas, more than I love Sam. I would throw myself into the pits of Hell for Sam, you know that, but for you? I would do whatever it took. I would rip apart souls in Purgatory. I would turn against Heaven. I would walk straight into Hell and kill the king if that’s what you wanted.

“I know you, Cas. You want to give up. I know a thing or two about giving up—and that’s why I had to come up here and beg you not to, because there’s a slim chance you might be able to hear it and I’m not afraid to try it. I know you’ll want to let go, Cas, but I don’t want you to. A few days before I met you, I had put all of my money into this box for Sam, and I wrote a note, and I was going to blow my brains out, Cas. Tied up all the loose ends and everything. And then something in the back of my mind talked me out of it, told me that I was going to be needed for something. Sat there for hours with my gun against my temple, and then—I didn’t do it. I went on. And then I met you and, honest to God, my first thought was: This was the reason why. This was what was worth it.

“I knew I was meant to love you, Cas. So, so completely, so devotedly. I guess you were meant to put me together, and then break me apart.

“I can’t blame you for that. If you, Sam, and Jess were gone, I wouldn’t waste a second before deciding none of this was worth it, and I would give up the will to live. I would be too scared to face life without you three. But, Cas, you still have us. You have lost people, but there are still people so devoted to you that are willing to help you through this, people who love you, and I think that’s worth considering. I love you more than life. I would do anything for you.

“I would give whatever I had to give to get you a second chance. But that’s not my call.

“I guess I believe that people decide their own destinies. Free will, and all that. We choose, and we live with the consequences we accept, like it’s that simple. And maybe it is. I don’t know.

“What I’m trying to say, Cas, is that I’m not giving up on you. If you’re on the fence, I’m going to try my damnedest to tug you back onto the side that brings you home with me where you belong. But, if you’ve already made up your choice to leave, to be with your brother and sisters, then I can’t selfishly demand that you stay. I can only hope that you will.

“I love you. But I am not you.

“Stay for you, baby, or stay for me. Go for you, or go for them. It’s your choice. Just make it knowing that I love you, and that I will never leave you, and I will never stop loving you. I will always be there for you, Cas, even if you get sick of me. I love you so much that I will live for you, even if I don’t want to. I guess that makes me just as crazy as I think I am sometimes.

“You’re so brave, Cas, and you love so much. Just be you, baby. You’ve never done wrong just being you.

“I love you. I love you. I love you so fucking much. Cas, baby, please, stay. Stay with me. Please. I love you. I love you.”

Dean was fighting heaving sobs by now. He leaned down and pressed his lips against Castiel’s temple, whispering again and again how much he loved him, his tears soaking into Cas’s hair but he didn’t move, didn’t bother, not even when Tessa appeared at the foot of the bed, looking down at him sadly and hesitantly, looking like this was her least favorite part of what she does.

“Dean?” she eventually asked, so softly, but Dean heard her, because he closed his eyes. “I can’t let you stay here for much longer.”

“Okay,” he said hoarsely, forcing his eyes back open to study Castiel’s face. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, not moving, casting her eyes downwards. Dean backed away, looking at Cas desperately, like he wanted to drink him in, his hand gripping harder against Cas’s. Castiel looked across the bed from him, tears streaming down his face, feeling sick and loving and sad all at once, not knowing where to lean, not know what to hold onto. Dean leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead one more time, pressing hard, closing his eyes and letting more tears fall onto Cas’s skin.

“I love you, Cas,” Dean whispered into his skin like a prayer. “No matter what you choose. I love you so much.”

Dean got his feet slowly, letting go of Cas’s hand even slower, until they weren’t touching, and he reached one arm up and rubbed the tears away as best as he could, but his eyes were still red and his skin was still sunken and pale. Castiel watched him like a man dying of thirst looks at water and, as Tessa began to guide Dean away, he casted another look back at Castiel’s body, and he looked so broken that Cas whispered, “Dean?”

Dean disappeared into the elevator, crying already, and Castiel didn’t follow.

He looked back down at his body, and he took a deep breath.

 

**+16:15:31**

 

Jess gripped Dean’s hand as he talked, and Sam just looked at his brother like, maybe, this would be the time that he would lose him for good.

“He was so pale,” Dean murmured to them, a broken shell of the strong man he was, unable to breathe knowing that he might end up taking more breaths in his life than Castiel, and it made his head spin and his heart hurt. “He was hooked up to half a dozen machines. He—he looks like he is dying. He really looks like he is _dying_. I don’t know what I expected.”

“He might not be dying,” Jess reminded him softly, her optimism back with the passage of time, and she offered Dean a kind, if slightly tortured, smile. “He’s lasted so long, Dean. He’s hanging on so hard.”

“I know,” Dean said, sounding destroyed.

Castiel watched Dean, feeling like he was burning alive, tears still rolling down the cheeks that weren’t there, probably not even actual tears, but the intent was still there. Castiel was sitting in the waiting room chair on Dean’s free side, gripping the sides with hands that were going pale with the strain, as if his blood was even pumping. He felt like he was being tortured, like he was burning alive, like he was screaming as he drowned and was running out of air.

Castiel was going to give up, and then Dean spoke to him, and Cas wanted nothing more than to hold on, to wake up, to be normal again.

He didn’t.

It was the worst feeling. He was back on the fence, back to being unable to decide. And the longer the time ticked by, the less of a chance he would have to stay if he really wanted to. The more and more time that goes on, his body loses will and energy, and he begins to fade away. Castiel already felt like he was running on dead batteries, like it was taking more thought than he wanted to in order to keep himself planted at Dean’s side, like he was so tired that he kept nodding off sitting up, only to shock himself out of it.

The blackness passed through Castiel’s eyes again, and he gasped as he jerked out of it.

But this time he seemed to connect what was happening.

In the next instant, Castiel blinked into awareness at his body’s bedside. He was surrounded by nurses and doctors working frantically, and the sound of a flat-lining machine told the story that his heart was failing.

“No,” he whispered, watching himself die, feeling himself fade away, and panic rose in his throat, something like acid. “No. No, I want to stay.”

And yet, did he? Wasn’t he afraid to go on alone? Wasn’t he afraid of how his life will change when he opens his eyes? Wasn’t he terrified of what would happen if he walked out of this hospital on his own two feet, not knowing what to expect for the future?

Didn’t he want to be able to walk away from this hospital if he knew that Dean Winchester was taking the same steps at his side?

Didn’t he want to feel Dean’s skin again, to see him smile, to make him happy?

Didn’t Castiel love Dean Winchester too much to let him go?

So Castiel surged forward, through the doctors and nurses, practically through his entire body, and he yelled as he shoved his own hands inside of his real chest.

For a moment, nothing happened. And then, like trembling earth, Cas felt the heartbeat thunder through his entire body, reverberating in his soul, and his body started back up again, the heart picking up its beats, living on, powering on. Castiel watched the machines react, watched the relief spread through the doctors and nurses as another patient was saved for now, and Castiel took a step back, looking at himself fight, looking at himself live through the great and terrible.

He hurt so much. He lost so much. It would be too easy to give up.

 _I love you so much that I will live for you_ , Dean had told him, _even if I don’t want to._

And, really, isn’t that the whole point?

 

**+15:46:32**

 

When Tessa told Dean how close they came to losing Castiel, it took all he could not to cry.

Castiel was grateful there weren’t tears.

He hated the thought of breaking Dean Winchester, even just a little bit more.

 

**+15:28:10**

 

Inias saw them before they saw him. They saw him before Castiel did.

“Dean,” Inias said as he drew close enough, looking so tired and destroyed, like a good wind would tear him apart, that even Dean’s face crumpled in pity before he accepted the man’s embrace, clinging to him the same way Inias clung to him. Inias pulled away, reaching up and rubbing at his gaunt face, and asked, “Anything new?”

“He started to go away a few minutes ago,” Dean informed him, letting nothing be forgotten or forgiven, and Inias seemed to appreciate it, as much as it also seemed to pain him. His eyes closed, terrified, like he didn’t want to see the conclusion Dean may be about to bring upon him, but it was currently nothing but good news. “They were able to keep him going. He’s currently stable enough that they are considering taking him out of the ICU in about an hour. If they do, we’ll be able to go see him.”

Inias nodded slowly, Castiel’s closest childhood friend and the only man that would have ever been good enough on this earth to love his twin sister, and his words were choked when he said, “Thank God.”

“I’m so sorry, man.”

“I am, too,” Inias whispered, and then smiled a little bit, still so sad and tortured, but he had two reasons to keep going, and they were both with his mother at home, sleeping in cribs, breathing even if the woman he loved so much wasn’t anymore, and he swallowed hard before he confessed, “I was worried Castiel would go, you know? Like he would know about Anna, and he wouldn’t be able to live without her, and he would pass on to be there with her and Balthazar and Hael and their mom.”

“No,” Dean said, breathing out. “I don’t think he’s quite willing to give up yet.”

“Good,” Inias agreed, sitting down next to the seat Dean had vacated. Sam and Jess watched on from the hallway, where they had been standing and talking in hushed voices, but they still did not approach. Dean lowered himself into the chair beside him, settling in for one of the longest and most terrifying nights of his life, and Inias breathed out like he had been holding the breath. “Anna used to tell him these stories about angels—did you know that? She turned it into a book, and she was thinking about publishing it, but then the kids came and—but yeah, there was this story about fallen angels, and how the angels would fall for love of humanity. Did you know that? It was a cute story, absolutely enchanting. I wonder if they would still publish it.”

“I didn’t know that,” Dean admitted, tilting his head to look at the widow brother-in-law who believed in Castiel because he was the only thing left he could believe in to make it, and Dean felt so much respect for this man to be there right then. Castiel did, too. “They fell to be human?”

“No,” Inias said. “They fell for humans. They fell to be one, to understand them. The angels loved humans so much that they wanted to become one. And the story—the one that Anna wrote into a novel—it was about a guy angel who lived in the stars, and he dropped down to the surface and gave up his wings for a guy with the stars in constellations on his face. She really loved that story. It meant so much to her.”

Dean didn’t say anything.

“I think,” Inias whispered, “that Anna would want Castiel to live more than she would want herself to live. She always wanted him to be happy even if she couldn’t be. She was always protecting her little brother. Maybe she even wants to protect him from giving up.”

Dean closed his eyes and, still, did not answer.

“I don’t know,” Inias admitted, and they fell into a long silence.

 

**+14:12:56**

 

Castiel’s body was moved out of the ICU and into a coma ward. He guessed that they figured they could have better uses for that bed, and he didn’t blame them. He didn’t think he needed intensive care. If he was going to be honest, the only things he would really need would be a burger, a beer, and to feel Dean’s heart beating under his hand.

When they moved him, they announced that the family could go in there and see him for very short periods, so as to not to distress him, and just in case of another emergency. Dean hadn’t really moved since Inias had told him the angel story. Cas thought that it might have shaken him up. So, instead, Sam and Jess conceded to let Inias go first, and Inias nodded his thanks quietly before letting Tessa lead him away, handing him off to Castiel’s new doctor, a goofy and gangly man who insisted Inias call him Garth. He was too chipper of a man to work with comatose patients. He should have been the kind of person that worked in pediatrics.

Inias paused in the doorway, looking at Castiel’s body, which had only slightly better coloring. Inias took a nervous step inside, and then paused.

“Anna is gone,” Inias whispered to Cas’s body, taking a harsh breath in. “I don’t know what to do. I have two babies, her babies that she wanted so much, but how am I supposed to keep on living our life knowing that she won’t be there when I get home? That she won’t be bugging me to take out the garbage or to go feed the baby or telling me that my ass looks terrible in my work slacks?”

Castiel let out a numb, startled laugh from the bedside. Inias hesitated like he had heard him before dropping down in the chair opposite, holding his hands together as if in prayer before him, and Castiel watched his brother-in-law attempt to think, attempt to collect himself.

“It’s going to be so hard,” Inias admitted in a whisper, fighting back tears. “It’s going to hurt, and they’re going to need you, Cas. Alfie and Hester are going to need you to tell them about how amazing their mom was, and how much people loved her. They’re going to need you to tell them the stories that Anna used to tell you, and they’re going to need you to tell them which one was her favorite. You can’t leave the world without it’s fair share of Novaks, Castiel. You can’t do that do Anna’s memory.”

Inias rubbed his face and then blurted out, “She loved you. She would want you to fight. I don’t know. I guess it’s selfish, but I want you to stay. If it had been me and you in that accident, and if I had died, I would have wanted you to stay. I would have needed you to, for the kids, for her. She deserves so much, and I can’t give it to her. I guess I’m trying to make up for that by trying to keep her little brother here.

“She loved you. But, I guess, she would have let you go, if she had to. But I don’t think she would have ever been the same after, and I know you won’t be, and I know how hard that is going to be. I don’t blame you for wanting to stay away from this hurt, from this real, for this long. But there’s a man down there that loves you so much. He would sell his soul if it would save yours. I guess I just don’t want to see you take that for granted.”

Inias got to his feet, his fingers still so tightly clasped together, and said, “Maybe you could live for her, Cas. If that’s not too hard.”

And then he turned and walked away.

 

**+13:24:02**

 

“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” Jess asked Sam softly, anxiously, glancing over her shoulder as if Dean or Cas would be able to hear her—and, Castiel supposed, she wasn’t too far off from her paranoia about one thing. Dean, however, was still holding his silent vigil with Inias in the corner, neither of them speaking, neither of them practically even blinking. Just waiting. “The accident was hours ago, almost twelve by now. It’s getting to a worrisome time. He’s already flat-lined so many times already, and I guess I’m just worried that his heart won’t be able to take the strain.”

Sam thought about it, actually and truly stood there and considered it for a long, long moment. Jess, ever so patient, stood there and let him. Castiel looked between them, wondering if this was how their dynamic worked, and how interesting it was. Eventually, Sam took a deep breath.

“I think he’ll make it,” Sam admitted.

“What makes you so certain?”

“He loves Dean, and he loved Anna,” Sam told her, shrugging. “What else matters?”

Jess looked as thought she wanted to admit that she didn’t know what Sam meant, but she didn’t. She just nodded slowly and looked away.

Castiel wondered if, maybe, out of all of them, they should have been paying more attention to making sure Jess was okay.

She had seen the bodies, and the scene.

She must not have been okay.

But, to keep Sam and Dean sane?

Jess would have walked through lava. Barefoot.

Cas admired that about her.

**+12:56:43**

 

Garth came out to tell Dean there was no news, eventually. Dean, at first, thought it was a stupid thing to do, to make him worry horrifically in that split second that something had gone wrong. And then, as he had watched Garth lope back to the elevator bank, he realized that one second of panic was worth the relief of knowing that everything was looking to be okay.

Dean was a little thankful for the goofy-looking bastard.

 

**+12:30:32**

 

Bobby Singer, practically Dean’s father, showed up for a little while. He stayed, and he hovered around and talked to everyone, wringing his cap anxiously in his hands, before he left. Castiel didn’t blame him. His mother, like Bobby’s late wife, had died of cancer, too. He understood how it felt to stand in one, knowing that people were dying the same way she may have.

Castiel never thought he would be one of them.

 

**+12:09:30**

 

Cas’s favorite stories that Anna used to tell were the ones that she began to weave about a week after he admitted to her, in tears, that he liked boys and he didn’t like girls, in _that_ way. She had nodded slowly, and she hadn’t said anything more. Castiel had been so worried that he had somehow offended her, if she would have somehow believe that it was wrong, that someone liked another of the same gender. He was worried that she would think of him as a freak.

That week was when the stories changed. The prince didn’t get a rich princess anymore. He got a dashing knight, a wealthy young king, a gorgeous stable boy, a confident warrior.

Castiel had let tears pool over in the darkness with just the two of them.

Cas had never thanked her for those nights.

 

**+12:00:52**

 

Castiel had thought that they wouldn’t have any more surprises for the day.

And then Gabriel Novak burst through the doors of the ER.

 

**+11:58:43**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr: shortenedlanguage.tumblr.com
> 
> xo Slang


	3. Beyond the Veil

Castiel remembered in vivid detail the day that Gabriel left.

Their mother died on a Thursday morning, somewhere around dawn, and she had been surrounded by all of her children. Their father had been inexplicably missing, as he always had been, and none of them had even wanted him there in a time so intimate, a time for family and vulnerability that they wouldn’t have been able to have for their closure if he had walked through the door, pretending to fit into their lives like a dripping wet cardboard puzzle piece. Castiel and Anna had been on one side of their mother, while Hael, Balthazar, and Gabriel sat on the other. Gabriel was the oldest, and he was an adult at that time, even when Castiel was barely an adolescent. Gabriel had tried to stay so strong for them, but Cas had been able to see the tears.

Their mother had died, and it had been like a piece of Gabriel had died, too.

They buried her on Monday and, the second she was in the ground, Gabriel hugged all of their siblings, and then he got in his car. They never saw him again.

Every once in a while, there had been a phone call, but the last one had been spaced years apart, and Cas had been so angry at how Gabriel had somehow accidentally morphed into their father while trying to escape the man that he had held a venomous grudge. Anna was the last one to talk to him. He called her when she had her miscarriage, and she stayed up talking to him all night as tears rolled down her face. And, after he had hung up, they heard nothing. Not even when Anna’s next pregnancy was successful.

Some part of Castiel hated him. He wanted to hate Gabriel with the same conviction that he hated his father, but the twisted part of him in the back of his mind understood Gabriel too strongly to hate him. Cas and Gabriel had always been close in mentalities, and they had both wanted to get out. They both wanted to run and never look behind them.

The only difference was that Gabriel had done it. Cas had hung back, too blinded by familial loyalty, too convinced that it would feel like abandonment if they lost too much of their family too quickly.

But he had understood Gabriel. He knew what it felt like to hurt so much that running seemed to be the only option.

Maybe, in this in-between of life and death, Cas understood him even a little bit more.

Gabriel had once sat up and played board games with he and Anna when no one else would, for hours and hours and hours until the room was dark and they had to smuggle in flashlights. He had taught Cas how to ride a bicycle, and he had soothed the scrapes and bruises they had gotten from the failed attempts. Gabriel had taken them to school when their mother wasn’t well enough and their father hadn’t managed to come home that night.

Cas wanted to hate Gabriel, but he never could.

And there he was—hours after an accident where Castiel had somehow managed to lose almost everyone he loved in one foul swoop, running through the doors of the Emergency Room with his clothes disheveled and his eyes swollen and sunken, his hands shaking. Cas almost didn’t recognize him.

Gabriel had been a prankster, a trickster. And there he stood, nothing but a scared, broken man afraid of his own shadow, and Cas suddenly felt debilitating gratefulness to see him.

Cas had lost so much today, but at least there were some things he hadn’t.

Gabriel sprinted to the front desk, stopping short with his hands on the counter, his eyes frenzied. The nurse looked up, startled, and he even drew the attention of Dean and Inias, who had been talking together softly at their bank of chairs, but their gazes didn’t stick. Gabriel worked to collect his breath, panting as if he had just run there from the airport or of some equivalent, and Castiel hovered next to the nurse, looking at Gabriel in surprise, his mouth twitching at the corners. He didn’t know if he wanted to frown, smile, or cry.

“Where are they?” Gabriel demanded, winded, and Cas’s heart sunk. “I had family admitted here and I just got off the plane and I don’t know what happened—”

“Sir,” the nurse had to say a little loudly, holding her hands up. The dark-haired nurse that always seemed to know the things unexplained, the woman named Pamela, was crossing the room, and she paused to watch, her eyes already seeped in sadness. “Sir, I’m going to need for you to tell me your name.”

“Gabriel Novak,” Gabriel said, and nothing happened.

And then Dean was on his feet, starting his way over, and he echoed incredulously, “ _Gabriel Novak_?”

Gabriel looked up, taken aback by the stranger he wouldn’t know, because he had never been there, and Dean’s fists clenched like he wanted to hit him. Gabriel looked him up and down before he demanded, “And who are you?”

“Dean Winchester,” Dean growled, flinching slightly, like Gabriel’s gaze was made of a million daggers. “Castiel’s boyfriend. But I guess you wouldn’t know that, huh?”

“Anna mentioned you,” Gabriel said, not knowing what those words meant, because then Inias appeared out of nowhere, his own anger and grief flooding into the space between, and Cas wanted so badly to go stand in between the two sides, but he knew he wouldn’t do any good. He was just another ghost in their lives, another person to haunt them. Gabriel spotted Inias and looked so, so guilty before he managed to demand, “What is going on here? Will someone tell me what’s happening?”

“They’re dead,” Inias said, his voice cracking, and he had to look away and swallow violently before he explained, “Balthazar, Hael, Anna. They’re dead.”

Gabriel reached out and gripped the counter as his face paled, and he looked suddenly like he was going to be sick. Cas swallowed hard, hating to hear the words out loud, because that made it feel so real. He knew it, knew it like he knew Dean’s heartbeat or the way he breathes, but hearing words so permanent and concrete nearly sent him stumbling backwards, like it was a physical blow.

Dean was shaking, but his anger had faded, and he just looked so devastated. Inias looked broken, wrung out, like his night had ended so long ago but he couldn’t bring himself to leave, to abandon the only tie to Anna he had left. Sam and Jess hovered uncertainly behind the two of them, ready to start an argument but not wanting to intrude on a family in mourning.

Gabriel reached up and rubbed his hand over his face. Cas could have sworn his strong eldest brother was wiping away tears, but his eyes looked relatively dried, if terrorized, when he let his hand drop back to keeping him standing. The nurse watched them cautiously, unsure of what was about to happen. Cas couldn’t blame her. He didn’t know, either.

And then Gabriel whispered, hoarsely, “And Castiel?”

“Coma,” Dean said, his voice breaking, and he looked down, his throat working. Cas wanted to cross the space and put his arms around him, comfort him, but that was beyond him now. “They don’t know if he’s gonna be okay. He almost gave up a couple of times, but we just don’t know.”

Gabriel closed his eyes.

“How did you find out?” Inias demanded softly.

“Apparently, I’m Balthazar’s emergency contact,” Gabriel informed them, and then shook his head slowly, laughing numbly. “Should have known the resourceful asshat would have been able to find me. He could weasel information out of anything with a heartbeat. Of course, they didn’t tell me much—just told me there had been an accident. Said that they had all been in it. Didn’t tell me that he—”

Gabriel suddenly looked away and swallowed hard. He looked back to Dean and Inias, his jaw clenched, determined to be strong enough in a way he hadn’t been in a long time, and the spark in his eyes reminded Castiel of the time Cas had put their father in the hospital, and, on the car ride there, Gabriel had murmured to tell the cops that he had done it, that Cas had seen it but hadn’t done anything.

Gabriel had always protected his siblings, even when he was gone. When they needed him to be there, he appeared, a human shield from the bad. Even if he missed the good, he always made sure to be there to conquer the bad for them, anything that they needed.

And now there he was. He hadn’t been able to save them. He hadn’t known that he would have to.

Anna had once referred to him as an archangel, filled with wrath and might and justice. And, looking at him now, Cas couldn’t help but to think that she hadn’t been too far from the truth.

Now, though, no one knew what to do. Everything was wrong.

“I left as soon as I could,” Gabriel confessed to them, suddenly sounding so shattered, and he had to clear his throat in an attempt to reconstruct his perfect façade of calm. “I was in Mexico City, and I got the first plane I could, but it had a goddamn layover, and it took me what felt like forever to get here. I wished—I wished I could have been here sooner. I am so, so sorry. I should have been here. I left them alone, and I should have been here.”

Gabriel buried his head in his hands, gripping at his hair like he wanted to pull it from his scalp. Cas wished he would have been able to tell his brother that he wasn’t mad. That he didn’t blame him.

Gabriel probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

“Can I see him?” Gabriel whispered, so vulnerable, and it looked like even stubborn Dean didn’t have the heart to tell him no, to tell him that he didn’t deserve it, like he probably felt. Dean had lived a world where family was everything, and he was looking at a man who had left his family when they needed him because he couldn’t handle it for himself.

It was selfish, but it was understandable. Maybe Dean was willing to forgive that. Maybe Dean knew that Cas would be alone if he didn’t.

“Yeah,” Dean whispered, swallowing heavily, and looked to the nurse’s station, searching for someone familiar. “Yeah, you can see him.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Gabriel promised him, sounding like so much of an older brother that Castiel started to cry, reaching up and hugging his middle in a desperate attempt to keep him from falling apart. Gabriel took a deep breath before he said, “Cas is going to be okay, Dean. It’ll be okay.”

No one believed him. But Dean still nodded, and helped him find Garth, and he still watched Gabriel walk heavily down the hallway to the elevators without looking back, and Cas wondered if Dean was hoping it would be enough.

Cas waited for a moment, studying Dean’s face, wondering if this would be for the final time, feeling like everything was coming to a close, before he followed behind Gabriel.

 

**+10:52:39**

 

Garth left Gabriel at the doorway to the room after filling him in on the details of his diagnosis. For the first time, Castiel listened to the list of all that was wrong with him—his broken ribs, his internal bleeding, his shattered leg, his hard hit to the head, the cuts that littered his skin from broken glass and split metal. Gabriel didn’t comment as Garth let him know what the recovery time would look like, none of them saying the possible alternate ending to the story, all of them looking toward a positive future. Gabriel thanked Garth for the run-through and watched the gangly doctor lope away down the hallway before he let his shoulders drop, defeat sinking into his body language. Gabriel took a deep breath, and then turned to cross through the door and into Castiel’s hospital room.

Cas watched his brother nervously, not knowing what to expect. He remembered Gabriel’s cool control when their father lay bleeding before Castiel, and he remembered Gabriel’s tears when their mother passed from a cancer that would not spare her. Castiel wasn’t sure what reaction would have made him feel better.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Gabriel didn’t do any of what Castiel was expecting.

He didn’t do much of anything at all, at first. He just stood there, staring, stoic.

It was an infinitely more unsettling.

Castiel stood invisible with his hands clasped in front of him, his eyes wide as he watched his brother stand in the doorway and watch over him, his eyes tracing up and down Castiel’s withered body like he was trying to realize that this person before him was his littlest brother. Cas hovered, nervous almost, worried for the explosion that may come, as Gabriel stood with no reaction, breathing, staring. Nothing moved.

And then Gabriel crossed into the room, closing the door halfway as much as he could get away with before he started for the bed, reaching out as if to touch the sheets but didn’t want to shatter the illusion the entire scene felt like. Cas took a step back as if he were corporeal as Gabriel moved to walk where he stood, taking one step after the other to stand over Castiel’s upper body, looking down at his head. His face was so still. Cas ghosted to stand next to him, standing vigil overtop of his body as well, Castiel’s fingers twitching anxiously as he waited for his elder brother to start talking.

Minutes passed. Cold, terrible minutes of silence, stillness, uncertainty. Castiel eventually couldn’t take it anymore, his skin itching, and he turned to look at his brother, wondering what he was thinking in that moment.

Gabriel was crying.

He was standing with his back straight and his hands clenched into tight fists at his side, his eyes trained on Castiel’s face, and there were tears rolling down his cheeks, his breath ragged, every once in a while his shoulders heaving with the effort to keep quiet, like making a noise would shatter the perfect foundation of Castiel’s possible recovery. Cas watched him, stunned, as Gabriel’s face contorted with grief and terror, and his breathing became more and more erratic.

Castiel had never seen his eldest brother cry like this. Tears, but not the kind where chests shake with the effort to hold in sadness. Tears, but not the kind that don’t stop coming. Gabriel had once broken down, screaming at the wind, but his tears had not been like this; Gabriel had looked ruined the night that he had left, his eyes tortured and haunted, but the tears he had cried were silent and sorrowful, and they had been the kind that Castiel had been able to forgive.

This was watching a man’s world come crashing down. It felt like an invasion of his brother’s privacy, like Castiel didn’t belong in this moment of vulnerability, but it was happening over his unresponsive body to the soundtrack of his slowly beating heart, a moment spurred by him and his choice, and Gabriel was standing in the middle of it with nothing but loss and hope and anything it took to keep him going.

It took another few minutes of silent tears before he started to speak. Castiel almost wished that his brother had spent the rest of his time speechless, broken.

“I must’ve stress-ate twenty Snickers bars on the way here,” Gabriel joked softly to Cas’s body, reaching forward until his fingers skimmed the blanket, close enough that he must have been able to feel what little heat his battered body was allowing to escape. “I think I scared a stewardess or two. Probably maxed my credit card on those pansy-ass in-flight vodkas. I barely even remember it, to be honest. I was so panicked. I was worried and terrified all at once. It’s not every day that the only family you have left is all in a fatal car crash. It feels like my life is a freaking soap opera right now, man.”

Gabriel’s voice was shaking. He looked down at his hands on the bed sheets before he slowly pulled them closer to his body, twitching back into loose fists, and he took a staggering sharp breath before he whispered, “Life can change in an instant, huh, little brother?”

Castiel remembered their mother’s diagnosis, huddling in a closet to keep away from the screaming monster pounding on the outside, a bloodied knife, their mother’s passing, Gabriel’s absence, their father’s poisoned end. Life and its changes definitely happened quickly and when they were least expected.

Maybe, sometimes, there were warnings. Maybe this was Castiel’s.

He just wasn’t sure what it was trying to say.

Gabriel swallowed heavily before he murmured, “That guy out there, Dean—you picked a good one, Cassie, I’ll tell you. Pretty, sure, but he’s damn fiercely loyal, can tell that from just a few minutes. Anna told me you’ve been together a long time, and it shows. Invite me to the wedding, alright? I’m—I think I’m done with running. I don’t think I want to leave again.

“I didn’t want to leave the last times. I didn’t want to, but I had to, because I’m a coward. I know you and Balthazar glorified me because Michael was a shithead of a father, but I’m not something to be glorified, little brother. I’m a mockery and a failure and you were both everything that I’m not and I was so goddamn proud. I was afraid of you, of looking at you two and realizing that you both had become these great people when I had been there looking after you and I didn’t equate to anything as noteworthy—but I’ve always been proud. Make no mistake, Castiel. I took so many hits for all of you. I tried the best I could. Even if my best couldn’t last forever, I tried. And now I’m standing here talking to you like you can hear me, thinking about having to bury my little brother and sisters, and I’m—I’m fucking shattered, man. I’m scared and I don’t want to be here but I will be, because it’s about time I’m brave and loyal and all of those things that you are. I’ve missed you, Cassie. Don’t make me miss you forever.”

Castiel blinked back his own tears, looking hopefully down at his big brother, his protector, and he saw nothing but pride and anguish, and it was terrible and beautiful and painful and amazing at the same time. Gabriel was so proud of him, so much prouder than Castiel had ever thought he would be, and now he was losing him. Castiel was straddling a decision that could mean everything, but how in the world could he choose when both sides gave him so much to lose?

Gabriel looked down at his little brother, choked with tears, and said, “I want to come home. I want you to be there when I do.”

Gabriel reached out softly and pulled his fingers through Castiel’s hair, his fingers mussing it like he was made of fragile glass, the antithesis of how they had always done it all brotherly and roughness and fondness. Castiel swallowed hard, missing the feeling of that touch without realizing he ever would, his thoughts jumbled again because, as much as he thought he was making a decision, he just didn’t know. And, as if Gabriel knew that, he stopped at the door before he left, one hand on the doorknob, and he hooked his head around over his shoulder, tawny eyes falling on a face covered in bandages and tubes and wires.

Gabriel opened his mouth, and then closed it. He took a deep breath.

“Don’t make me bury you, too,” Gabriel whispered.

 

**+10:13:45**

 

Sam came into the room next. It wasn’t surprising—he had been there since the very beginning, walked through the hospital doors before even Dean had, but he hadn’t made a fuss about not being in to see Castiel. He hadn’t said a word. But, now, the frenzy had died down, and Garth had been pulling a couple of strings to let them come in and visit as they pleased for short periods of time and, when he offered for another non-family visitor, everyone had stepped aside to allow Sam to go through.

Castiel had met Sam Winchester in a law class and had immediately been impressed with him, and had told him as such when they had met, which had embarrassed and humbled Sam to the point that he had asked Cas to go to coffee to talk about their new assignment. And, as simple as that, a friendship unrivaled by any Castiel had ever had flourished from it.

Sam was a quirky kid, smart to a fault, and he and Cas had gotten along in an unspoken way. They had only grown closer the night that Castiel met Dean for the first time.

Sam meddled a little bit. Cas, despite acting indignant, had always been grateful for his efforts. Sam was an instrumental part of Cas and Dean’s relationship, and there couldn’t have been a better glue to hold them together than the pure soul of Sam Winchester.

Sam wasn’t like the others. He walked through the door of the room and settled down neatly in one of the chairs beside Castiel’s, positioned away from the machines just in case. Castiel hovered on the other side of the bed, gazing across at Sam as he settled into the chair easily, laying his forearms on the bedrail, clasping his hands as if he was about to begin praying.

Sam had told him that there had once been a time when he prayed, back when he was scared and in a situation so close to Cas’s childhood that they could have been one and the same. He had told him once, late into a California night and several beers later, that he didn’t pray anymore.

He looked to be reconsidering that philosophy.

Sam cleared his throat and said, “Hey, Cas.”

Cas looked back at him, smiling fondly, and couldn’t help but to respond, “Hello, Sam.”

“It’s been quite a day, huh?” Sam asked, laughing humorlessly. “I don’t know, man. I just can’t really believe it. Everything happened so fast, but it’s only been a couple of hours. Less than a day. Feels like a year.”

Cas couldn’t help but to silently agree.

“Jess is worried about you. She was really shaken—she was one of the medics on the scene, before she even knew it was you, and it really shook her up. Can’t blame her. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had seen you and the others on a scene like that. It sounded like it looked nightmarish. I don’t even know how to tell you how sorry I am, man.”

He didn’t have to. Sam wore his emotions on his sleeve sometimes, his eyes wide and honest. Cas didn’t need him to say it with words, because Sam made up for it in raw emotion.

“When Jess called me and said you’d been in a car accident, I was so scared you wouldn’t be okay,” Sam confessed, so openly willing to talk to a quiet room and his comatose friend if it meant that maybe he would hear him, and Cas’s heart expanded a little more in his chest, caring so much for this man that Dean had raised to be the best person on the face of the earth. “She said you were hurt, and I just panicked and—isn’t it ironic, though? That you’re working in a firm, spending your time representing people in car accidents, and this happened? Fucking sick, I guess, but yeah. Weird how these things happen.”

Sam shifted in his seat, as if nervous, before he said, “Dean can’t live without you, Cas. Don’t leave. Please, just—don’t go, if you can help it. I know it probably doesn’t work that way but, if you can, try to stay. He needs you. And, I guess, it’s selfish, but I need him to need you. Dean has always been so happy when he’s around you. I’ve never seen him happier. I guess I had gotten used to it. Now, looking at him, I see him falling back down to where he had been when I was a kid, you know? And I’m terrified. I don’t know how to help him. I couldn’t imagine what he would do if we had to bury you.

“It’s selfish, Cas, and it’s not fair, but I want you to really think about your choice, if you can even hear me or if it’s really a choice. Dean loves you so much he’s bursting with it. I’m afraid of what will happen if you go. I don’t know how to save you. I don’t know what I can say to get you not to leave that isn’t a lie or a painful truth. I just don’t know. And I think that’s what kills me the most. All of this is out of our hands. Really, I don’t know whose hands it’s even in.”

Sam hung his head, pausing to catch his breath and return it to a regular rhythm before he returned his gaze to Castiel’s unmoving face. Castiel gazed at Sam desperately, but he did not sense that he was there, and Cas almost felt like a fool for hoping that he would.

“I know you, Cas,” Sam said evenly. “You’re my best friend, and I know you. So I like to think I know what you would choose, if it was in your hands.”

Sam left with that, with those words lingering in the air and a wordless pat on one of Castiel’s hands, and Cas didn’t follow him as he left, instead staying there and considering his words for a moment, closing his eyes and imagining his options, wondering what exactly Sam would think, and thinking that he knew.

 

**+9:43:21**

 

“Hi, Cas,” Jess murmured softly as if afraid to wake him, smiling shakily. “You look better. Your color is returning a bit. That’s always good.”

Of course, Castiel couldn’t exactly answer. He just hovered beside the doorway, his arms hugging his midsection, his thoughts running through his head at four hundred miles per hour, and he couldn’t turn any of them off. Jess, as if sensing this, just cleared her throat and leaned back in the chair, fidgeting.

“I know we haven’t been the greatest friends,” she confessed, “but you’re Sam’s best, and Dean loves you, and I have a great respect for you, Cas. You’re a great man who has earned the love and respect of the two best men I have ever known, so you deserve to know that. And, really, right now, I just want to be honest with you.

“I saw the accident,” she reminded him like he would ever be able to forget the way he had screamed for her attention, panicking, the world blurring at the edges as his life began to dance away, slipping through his fingers like sand. “I saw your brother and sister, and I am sorry about that so much. They were amazing, beautiful people, and the world couldn’t have made a worse choice when they chose to pluck them from the earth. But life moves on, Castiel. Time heals. Time crawls, but it does so to make sure it leaves no one behind. If you hung on, everything would be okay. I hate to admit this, but everything would end up being okay if you passed on, too. But I don’t want that. I don’t want to watch a family decimated like that.

“You’re an amazing man, Castiel Novak, and Dean loves you so much. I know you know that. I like to think that you love him enough to know that he needs you to stay. But, really, I don’t know. I don’t know if you can hear me. I’m a woman of medicine, so I’ve never been one for superstition. But that was all before I wanted someone to hear me.

“I trust you, Castiel, not to break their hearts. Or, if you do, I hope you know for certain that they will mend if you can’t hold on anymore.

“I believe in you, Cas.

“Sometimes, people just need to know that.”

 

**+8:34:22**

 

Garth came out, again, to tell them there was no change. Dean got twenty minutes of sleep on one of the hospital chairs, purely from exhaustion, before he shocked himself out of it. The moment he woke up, it seemed, a nurse bustled from the station to tell them that they could go sit in the chairs upstairs in Castiel’s ward, that she phoned ahead and told the nurses that it was alright. They thanked her.

Castiel couldn’t help but to think that Pamela had an ulterior motive.

 

**+8:09:43**

 

“I don’t understand how these chairs are _more_ uncomfortable than the ones downstairs.”

 

**+7:28:29**

 

Inias came by Castiel’s room. He didn’t make it past the doorway before he shook his head and walked away, running a stressed hand through his hair. Castiel wondered if he should be going home soon. The children may need him.

Maybe they figured that Cas needed the moral support more.

Maybe they were right.

**+6:46:21**

 

Castiel looked down at his body, and he thought for a long, long time.

 

**+6:17:24**

 

Dean, Sam, Inias, Gabriel, and Jess continued their vigil from the end of the hallway, exhausted but refusing to leave for fear of Cas’s health decreasing if they left and for hope that it would get better if they stayed. Cas could understand their reasoning. Things always happened when they were least expected.

For a long period of time, they left Castiel’s room quiet, and he was able to get up and pace around it without interruption or distraction, other than the nurses who walked in and checked his vitals, scurrying in and out, all of them always looking so peaceful and tired all at once. A few times, Garth dropped in, just to check the charts and the monitors for himself. Every time, he patted Castiel kindly on the arm before he left, acknowledging him the best he could. Cas appreciated it, in any case, although he doubted that was the point of Garth’s movements.

Castiel’s next visitor should have been a perplexing one, but he wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

“Hello, handsome,” Pamela murmured as she wandered into the room, automatically reaching out and straightening his covers before sinking into the chair beside him, looking up and examining the monitor showing his heartbeats. “You look better. You look like you’re hanging on. That’s always nice. I like when they at least try to want to live. I like when people have hope.”

Castiel was finally faced with someone who might be able to hear him, who might be able to understand the points he is attempting to get across, but, in that moment, he had nothing to say to the kind nurse. He just stood there, and he watched her.

She took a deep breath before smirking and telling him, “I can feel your eyes on me. I don’t think you trust me. That’s fine. I like hearing the sound of my own voice, and I think you will be interested in my topic.”

Pamela leaned forward before she announced, “I think you’ve made your choice.”

Castiel, still, did not offer a comment. She didn’t seem to be waiting for one. She leaned back in her chair, examining Cas’s face as if expecting him to flicker to life, breathless and wounded, but he didn’t move, not in the bed and not from his spot on the opposite wall. She nodded to herself, as if expecting that kind of response, before she pushed herself up onto her feet.

“Good for you,” she told him, nodded again, and then walked out of the room, not even bothering to look over her shoulder.

Castiel never saw her again.

 

**+5:52:24**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Tumblr: shortenedlanguage.tumblr.com
> 
> xo Slang


	4. Say Something

It felt like there was something Castiel had to do before he finalized his choice. He felt like he was standing in front of a list of a million and one different things that had to be done, all of the chapters he needed to bring to a close, so many things that had to end. He drifted in a haze of his decision for a long time. For a while, he even began to fuse into the normal world, losing time, sinking into his decision like he was signing the contract in blood. He saw and heard a lot, but he wasn’t there.

He didn’t really mind.

 

**+5:32:57**

 

Sam and Jess eventually broke off from the group, unable to keep their eyes open enough to sit in that terrorizing still silence, and they went in search of coffee. They paced around the hospital for a few minutes, speaking very little and touching not at all, not needing it to know that the other was there and that they were safe. Jess eventually showed Sam to the cheap coffee, figuring that it was better than nothing even with the faint smell of something kind of like cat urine, and they both regretfully sipped at their cups as they stood against the wall in the back of the ER, not wanting to go back to their floor yet.

Jess leaned into Sam, closing her eyes, before she asked him, “How long do you think he’s going to stay here?”

Sam automatically knew who she was referring to, and he didn’t hesitate to answer, “For as long as it takes.”

“Maybe you should convince him to go home,” she told him, and then winced, remembering all of the reminders of Castiel that would be there and deciding against it. “Or maybe you could get him over to ours, get him a shower and sleep and food. He can’t let himself waste away.”

“He’ll try to,” Sam snorted, but there was something almost fond about it, if also tired. “Dean won’t be convinced to leave quite yet. He might be exhausted, but he would never forgive himself if he left and something were to happen either good or bad. He would feel like he abandoned him.”

“I’ve never seen Dean so hopeless.”

“I have,” Sam murmured sadly, and took another long drink from the questionable coffee.

Jess looked up at her fiancé, a man she loved more than life itself, and her stomach twisted to think of how much he was hurting. She leaned into his arm, trying to offer him her strength when she murmured, “What are we going to do?”

“We are going to wait for another few hours, I guess,” Sam murmured, shaking his head helplessly. “And then we are going to go home, rest, and hope for the best. I’ll go to work and so will you, and we’re going to wish for a miracle.”

“Dean keeps swearing that Cas knows about his brother and sisters.”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Sam told her flatly, and then couldn’t help a real rouge laugh to escape. “Cas was the kind of person that always knew everything before everyone else, you know? He used to be able to tell me how many tests would be in a class before we got the syllabus. I’m pretty sure the guy had some kind of psychic ability, but he always rolled his eyes when I tried to convince him to consider it.”

Jess laughed. “It doesn’t sound like something a reasonable law student would think of as a real option.”

“No,” Sam admitted, unable to keep himself from smirking. “I told you how we first started talking, right? How, one day, in class and out of nowhere, he just walked right up to me and told me I was the smartest person he had met on this track of study, and that he admired my ability to look at something so objectively and with passion. I had never been so blown away in my entire life. I was so lost that I asked if he wanted to get coffee and talk about a project, and Cas, he was never too good with social cues before he met Dean, just kind of looked me straight in the eye and told me that this was professional curiosity and not a date, and then he turned on his heel without telling me what coffee place. I took a shot in the dark and turned up there ten minutes later and he was already sitting there with two coffees and his notes, and he barely looked up before asking me a question about how I interpreted one of our readings. I had never met a guy quite like that.”

Jess smiled, but didn’t interrupt, to relieved to find a smile on Sam’s face for the first time since the accident that she didn’t dare burst the secure bubble that they were securing around themselves in that moment, blocking out the bad demons in their life for now, settling in to stay in this moment of peace.

She didn’t realize how much they had needed it until they were there, and then she didn’t want to leave.

“I never thought we’d actually be friends, with a meeting like that,” Sam continued happily, a smile at his lips and hope dancing back in his eyes. “But, then, we kept talking and we kept going out with friends. I introduced him to people and he kind of fit in awkwardly, you remember, but he got used to it, like he adapts to an environment. Like he’s a chameleon or something. And then we were out that night at that bar having beers and complaining about our chosen character paths when in walks Dean. I had never seen something so cartoon-heart-eyes. The minute Cas saw him, I knew he was hook, line, and sinker. And then I turned and saw Dean practically run into the waitress because he couldn’t look away from Cas, and it just felt right. It felt like, of course they would be together. Who else would they be with? They were the perfect couple. They still are. Though I think we are a good competition for them in that regard.”

Jess smiled and snuggled deeper into the curve of his arm. Sam smiled down happily at her, almost dazedly, like he didn’t even remember where they were anymore, and the relief was dizzying.

“They’re the kind of couple that’s supposed to last forever, you know?” Sam asked Jess, and she knew. She had seen it, too, in the way that Dean and Cas interacted, like they were old souls having found each other once again and finally. She had thought, more than once, that their romance was the type that went into print, not into real time. It was enchanting to be able to encounter, and she couldn’t wish more happiness upon more deserving people.

That fact alone was what made this so much more of a tragedy. It’s what made this so much more hopeless and terrifying.

No one deserved to have their other half ripped from them. No one.

Jess gripped Sam a little harder, and he reached a hand out to sooth her in response.

They stayed there in their own little bubble for as long as they could.

 

**+5:02:34**

 

Unable to take the silence any longer, Inias ended up wandering down an adjacent hallway and moving until he found the bathrooms, which was where he chose to hover, his phone open in his hand. He was sure no nurse would come up to tell him to keep off of it—he must have radiated the aura of new widower, because everyone so far had been leaving him alone, to which he couldn’t possibly be more thankful—and he took his time scrolling through the numbers, biting at his sore and raw lip.

Automatically, like on a reflex, his finger would reach out to select Anna’s name to call, and then he would have to pull himself back, coming back to a horrible reality that he hated more than life itself. He closed his eyes, swallowing heavily, thinking about all of the things that he hadn’t told her and what he had wished he had, all of the promises he had wanted to make her and hadn’t had the time. Ever since they were kids, Inias had dreamed of he and Anna growing old together, rocking chairs on the front porch and grandchildren running around a vast backyard, but now he wouldn’t have that. All of the plans he had crashed and burned with that hunk of metal that had ended up killing her. Inias lost everything in the snow, in a desperate Oregon winter.

He didn’t know where it left him anymore.

He didn’t know what person he could be without Anna.

He took a deep breath, and he selected a number.

“Hey, Mom?” Inias asked, his voice choked, when Rachel picked up the phone. He took a deep breath that shook and rattled all the way down into his lungs, but he still managed to speak the words he wanted to say when he asked, “How are Alfie and Hester doing?”

“Fine,” Rachel told him, her voice so sad. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better.”

“Is Castiel okay?”

“So far.”

“When are you coming home?”

Inias paused, because was it really home anymore?

It was where he carried Anna over the threshold in a white dress, and it was where they had gone to grieve behind closed doors when her first pregnancy had ended in disaster. It was where they had celebrated her new pregnancy, and it was where she used to tell him stories over dinner, dishes, anything. His home was where Anna juggled two children and he walked through the door at night and she had this pleased, exhausted smile on her face when she pulled him in for a hug and a kiss, and he didn’t know how he would be able to call it home when it was missing one of the most important parts.

And then he thought selflessly about the two other most important parts, and he couldn’t live in a world consumed by his own grief and turmoil anymore.

“Soon,” he told her, his voice breaking. “I’m—I’m going to stick around for another couple of hours, see if Castiel is going to be okay, and then I’m coming home, okay? I—I want to see them. I need to see them. But I can’t go home right now.”

And, somehow, his mother understood, because she whispered, “Come home when you can, sweetheart.”

He wondered if Anna would have been that kind of mother. Omniscient and loving.

Inias hung up before he could think too much about what could have been, and instead forced his mind onto what would be.

 

**+3:46:25**

 

“Hey,” Gabriel murmured when Inias finally sunk down beside him, returned from a supposed phone call that had managed to turn the other man’s eyes rimmed with red and rendered his throat raw. “You alright, kid?”

“What made you come back?” Inias demanded out of the blue, staring at his hands. “You leave, and then you come back. Why don’t you just choose one? Why do you choose to leave when you could stay?”

Gabriel could tell this wasn’t necessarily a question for him. but, still, he answered, but he wasn’t sure if it was the answer Inias wanted or appreciated and yet, maybe, it was the one he needed to hear.

“Because,” Gabriel responded, “it’s easier.”

Inias didn’t respond.

 

**+2:21:34**

 

Inias wished them all a goodbye and made Dean promised to call him if something changed before he loaded into a cab and headed back to Gresham, back to home, where his two small children were sleeping, and he closed his eyes and breathed in the back of the cab, trying not to let himself think about anything else, not tonight.

There would be plenty of time to worry about everything else later.

For now, he needed to think of his priorities, and all of the reasons he had to stay.

 

**+1:52:26**

 

Sam drank three more cups of that god-awful coffee. It didn’t help, but he liked to think it did.

 

**+1:24:53**

 

“Mind if I join you?” Gabriel asked from somewhere behind him, and Dean let out a long drag of his cigarette before turning, all of his limbs sluggish with so much weight of the world. Gabriel met his gaze evenly from the doors of the ER, and Dean managed to nod, going back to leaning against the side of the building, a cancer stick in between his fingers. Gabriel wandered over and stood beside him, not saying anything.

Dean, wound so tight, asked, “Are you here to psychoanalyze me?”

“No,” Gabriel replied, shrugging. “Wouldn’t even know how to begin to, anyway. I just wanted to check and see how you’re doing and, by the three dead butts already on the sidewalk, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you’re doing about as good as I expected.”

Dean didn’t know what to say to that, so he just breathed in even deeper.

“Don’t smoke, normally,” Dean informed him like he owed the eldest—only other remaining—Novak an explanation. “Only when I’m worried, or stressed, or both. I think it says something about my mental state that this is the first time I’ve been out here.”

“It’s been a long time since the news,” Gabriel noticed, raising his eyebrows. “Have you slept since?”

“Nope,” Dean responded, fingers shaking slightly from the rush of nicotine.

“That’s not healthy.”

Dean shrugged, and didn’t make another comment.

A thousand different things were running through his head, and all of them made him want to be reckless and stupid. He wanted to get in his car and drive, and never look back, living in doubt and dying curiosity for the rest of his life as he paid his way fixing up random motels somewhere in south Texas. But he also wanted to burst into Cas’s hospital room and grab him by the shoulders and start screaming and begging him to wake up, but he was sure that the outcome of that would be just as promising as the first scenario, and Dean liked betting where the money looked like it might make it somewhere.

Dean let the burnt-out cigarette drop to the ground, and he drove it into ashes with the heel of his dress shoe.

“I think the world stopped moving,” Dean said, “with the call.”

“Mine did, too,” Gabriel confessed, looking up into the sky. “Grounded to a halt. Thought that the force of the full-stop was going to throw me straight off into the atmosphere.”

“How are you so calm?”

“I only pretend to be on television,” Gabriel replied with his usual snarky attitude, and then sighed, unable to help the reaction when he was on the defensive. “I know that, if I’m not, then no one else might be.”

“Everything feels different all of a sudden, you know?” Dean suddenly asked Gabriel, turning to look at him, not even reaching for another cigarette, just keeping his hands shoved into his pockets and his shoulders bowed in an attempt to keep warm. “Something feels like it changed. Like it— _decided_.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Gabriel confessed, raising his eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Dean admitted, shaking his head, but he still felt tense and bothered, like his body was locking down and preparing for something that Dean didn’t even know what to expect. Dean tapped his foot against the ground, like he was checking to make sure it wouldn’t crumble under his weight, before he said, “I’m going back inside.”

Gabriel nodded and gestured for him to go in without him, and Dean hesitated for a moment before complying, ducking through the doors without comment. Gabriel watched him go, frowning at his back, before he reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a Twix, biting into one without looking away from the doorway, unable to explain how he felt everything that Dean was feeling, as well.

“Come on, Cassie,” Gabriel whispered, taking a deep breath. “Let this be good news.”

Gabriel knew it was a terrible habit, but he left the Twix wrapped crumpled up on the sidewalk with the cigarette butts.

 

**+0:36:49**

 

Castiel knew his choice.

 

**+0:21:35**

 

Dean and Gabriel sat on different sides of Castiel’s hospital bed, neither of them speaking, neither of them barely even paying attention to the other. Dean had Castiel’s hand held loosely in both of his, staring at his face and willing for those eyes to open. Gabriel was just watching the two of them silently, thankful that Cas would never be alone, thankful that Cas had been happy and protected even when Gabriel hadn’t been around to offer him salvation.

Castiel stood behind Dean, and he took a breath.

 

**+0:00:05**

 

“Come on, Cas,” Dean whispered into the silence.

 

**+0:00:04**

 

Gabriel looked at the heart monitor, a sick feeling suddenly washing through his stomach. He felt like he couldn’t blink, like he had to be looking. That he would miss something if his mind deviated for a moment.

 

**+0:00:03**

 

Castiel closed his eyes, and tears escaped.

 

**+0:00:02**

 

“Cas,” Dean whispered like a prayer.

 

**+0:00:01**

 

Castiel let go.

 

**+0:00:00**

 

The world stood still.

 

**-0:00:01**

 

And then Castiel’s hand squeezed Dean’s back.

“Cas?” Dean demanded, startled, so surprised he sprung to his feet. Gabriel’s head snapped over to look at him, startled by the sudden movement, and Dean didn’t bother to look over at the man when Cas made for a weak squeeze again, just a twitching spasm of a finger, but too good to be coincidence. Dean looked up to his face.

Cas’s eyelids fluttered.

“Cas!” Dean cried, and then he turned his frantic eyes to Gabriel. “Get a doctor.”

Gabriel was out the door and bursting into the hallway in seconds.

“We need a doctor!” Gabriel screamed, and Sam and Jess startled onto their feet at the end of the hallway, but all of their fears melted when Gabriel started laughing, halfway hysterical, and he yelled, “Garth, get your gangly ass over here, he’s waking up!”

Dean stood over the man he loved with all of his heart, one hand in Cas’s and the other on his face, holding him so softly, like he might break. Dean felt like it was _he_ that would break, but he didn’t let it, even as Garth bounded into the room as graceless as a baby deer, Sam and Jess following soon behind.

Dean paid them no mind. He stared down desperately at Cas, his hands shaking, and he needed one more miracle.

“Cas?” Dean whispered. “Cas, baby, are you there?”

Castiel opened his eyes, and he met Dean’s, and the world exploded into color. Dean could almost hear the words beyond the expression, and it took all he could not to burst into happy tears, relief flooding his limbs, when he saw Cas’s exhausted voiceless, _Hello, Dean._

It had been the longest twenty-four hours in the history of Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak’s lives, but, in the end,

Cas chose to stay.

And that was enough for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr: shortenedlanguage.tumblr.com
> 
> xo Slang


	5. When You Come Home

Almost an entire month passed before Castiel was cleared to leave the hospital.

There were times where the days had run smoothly, linear and pleasant, but there were others where waking up into the dawn of another day had been an uphill battle while pushing a boulder. Cas had mornings where he woke up without quite remembering what had happened, and then he blinked and looked around and processed the hospital room and remembered the funerals through dulled pain and portable IV drips and from the height of a wheelchair, and he suddenly felt like he had gone over the drop of a roller coaster.

He remembered nothing in the twenty-four hour period between the accident and when he woke in a hospital bed, the world drowned in senseless color for everything but the green of Dean’s eyes, and Castiel couldn’t be more thankful.

It had taken another few days of wakefulness before Gabriel and Dean had sat him down and broken it to him slowly and softly the news about his siblings. Cas surprised everyone, including himself, by not reacting hysterically with tears and denial and the whole dramatic waterworks that they all somehow must have been expecting. No—all Castiel had felt was a sick swirl of acceptance, as if he had known from the moment he had woken up that he would be shaking off a horrible veil of survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life.

Somehow, when he had woken up, he hadn’t been surprised to hear the news. It was as if he had inherently known it in his soul, in his subconscious. Like he had known from the moment the car careened into them that no one was going to make it.

Still, that form of knowing hadn’t made it easier.

Cas made it through most days clawing through them, hanging onto the edge by his fingernails, but Dean had dutifully been there to help hoist him back into the real world when he could. Dean had taken the first rocky week off from work to deal with the onslaught of everything, but now he was back to a normal schedule, going to work nine to five and popping in to see Cas for a couple of hours until the nursing staff, who all knew him by name now, told him that he had to leave. And even if they only got a few hours a day, Dean would call him as soon as he was safe at home and they would talk for hours, and Cas couldn’t have been more thankful to have him in his life.

The weeks after the accident certainly weren’t easy. Cas had broken several bones, one of them his right foot and the other his right femur, and it had kept him from being able to walk for a long period of time. He still had a cast, but now he was cleared from the back problems, now treated to the point that he could remain upright for hours with little aching, to use crutches, but that was only when necessary. Cas had also hit his head hard, too, and there were about two dozen times already where he had either noticed he dropped entire words from a sentence, or began one and made it halfway through before he had no idea where it was going. Dean always had this sad look when it happened, one that sent acid rolling in Cas’s stomach, but Dean always smiled so thankfully at him and gripped him hard, like he would float away, and it made up for all the hard times to see how thankful Dean was to see that he was okay.

The hospital kept Castiel so long for the back injury, and the head injury. But, now, one month later, they had deemed him well enough to merge back into the outside world, and Cas couldn’t be more thankful to get the hell out of that hospital bed.

However, the injuries hadn’t always been the hardest part.

Sometimes, it had been reaching over to pick up the phone and call Anna, and then realizing he couldn’t.

Sometimes, it had been wondering if Balthazar and Hael were coming to visit, and then remembering that they weren’t.

Sometimes, it was his memory, when he would open his mouth and start to ask Gabriel if the others were recovering well, and then having to drop off in the middle of the sentence the moment he saw the look of resignation cross his brother’s face, and he had to force himself to remember the bad.

Other times, it was the times where Inias brought the twins with him to visit. It was good to see Inias, always had been, but when Cas would hold one of the twins while the other sat in his lap, gazing curiously at the tubes and wires, Cas would look down and smile at them and think that they were so much like he and Anna, and then he would have to face the cold horror of having to face the world without her.

Castiel sometimes didn’t sleep, wondering why life was so unfair, so cruel. He wondered why the universe chose for him to make it through, but Balthazar and Hael had died on impact. He wondered how he had been able to hang on, but Anna had passed on an operating room table, and they hadn’t been able to convince her heart to keep beating, even if she had so much to live for.

Cas knew he would be asking those questions for a long time. So he tried to distract himself with the good things.

Sam came to visit every other day, always smiling wide, brimming with positivity and being so genuinely happy to see Cas recovering that it made Cas smile. Jess stopped in a few times a day when she was working, and she would sneak him extra food even if he didn’t ask for it, like she knew how much the cafeteria food got old, and he was grateful for it. Gabriel was in on the days where Sam wasn’t, slumped in the chair with his feet resting on Castiel’s bed, typing on a laptop and complaining about the idiots that worked around and underneath of him, bemoaning how no one could do anything without asking twenty people if they thought it was a good idea first. When Castiel had asked what his brother did now, Gabriel had just smirked and winked at him, and Cas found himself too worried on the legal side of his mind to ask too deeply, and that was the end of that.

But, even with all of that, Dean remained the best part of his day.

Nothing beat the way that Cas’s heart soared when Dean smiled at him. Nothing could trump the way Dean held him so reverently, so thankful, and the way that he pressed I-love-yous into his skin with his lips, breathing them into the air that they shared as they breathed. A day felt a little more worth living, even on the ones laced with guilt and depression, when Dean looked at him like someone who deserved to be saved, someone who deserved to live and be happy.

Dean loved him so much, even still. Cas couldn’t be more grateful.

Cas, confined to a wheelchair he didn’t need but was required to sit in, sighed impatiently from the edge of the lobby.

“Oh, don’t give me that,” Meg, a reoccurring nurse and the closest thing to a friend inside of the hospital, chided him from where she leaned against the wall next to him, both of them waiting for Dean to come back from stashing Cas’s small bag and his crutches in the trunk of the Impala. “He’ll be right back, and then you only have to come back this way for physical therapy. I know that’s your favorite.”

Castiel would have sighed again just to be dramatic, but it just felt like too much work.

As if sensing that there was a reluctant patient somewhere in the building, one of Castiel’s first doctors, and perhaps the most chipper and easy-going of them all, vaulted into the room, stumbling over his own two feet. It took him less than a nanosecond to spot Meg and Castiel, both of them huddled up next to the entrance impatiently, and he grinned before scampering over, reminding Castiel very strongly of the videos of the puppy Dean had gotten when Cas was still in the hospital.

The puppy, the husky that both Cas and Dean had liked at the shelter, had been a surprise. Dean one day, somewhere around the ten day mark after Cas woke up, walked into his room looking guilty, and Cas had narrowed his eyes.

“What did you do?” he had demanded before Dean had been able to take more than five steps into the room.

“I caved,” Dean had sighed, and then proceeded to show Castiel enough videos and pictures of the new animal that they must have been crowded around Dean’s phone for two hours. Castiel had wanted to be irritated, maybe even just a little irked, but Dean’s smile was too lovely for him to deny. And Cas, although he didn’t want to admit it, had definitely secretly wanted the puppy.

“We’ll get you a cat, too, I promise,” Dean told him a few days later, smiling sheepishly. “You’ll get to pick it. We’ll even buy it a little tower for it to perch on and look out the window, and a scratching post, and enough catnip to keep it from sleeping through the nights. Anything.”

Cas had been so humbled by the perfect man that he could call his that he had only been able to respond by kissing him.

“Heya, friends!” Garth chirped, shaking like a Chihuahua on speed. “Heading home, Cas?”

“Whenever Dean appears, yes,” Cas told him, scratching nervously at his leg cast, and then Garth suddenly transformed from domestic shelter animal to concerned parent dropping a child off at daycare for the first time.

“I’m so happy you’re well!” he said, and then sniffled suddenly. The show of sudden emotion was a little more than startling, but it was also pretty usual, so neither Cas nor Meg felt particularly disturbed. “I’m glad you get to go home, but I’m going to miss you and Dean, even if Dean is a little mean to me. You guys are great. Invite me to the wedding!”

Cas should be pleased that people keep assuming he and Dean are close to getting married, but it mostly just amused him. He’s sure it’s on the books, and that it will be an option soon, but it’s not something either of them are currently talking about. They have been through so much, and now they know how valuable time can be.

“Sure thing, Garth,” Cas decided to tell the man, choosing to pacify rather than disappoint. It showed to be the right choice, because Garth’s face lit up like a Fourth of July sky.

Dean inadvertently chose a perfect time to enter, casually passing through the door and looking around for Cas, smiling the moment their eyes locked and heading over to him. Cas took the chance to heave himself out of the wretched chair, Meg grumbling as she had to catch him, since she was about half the size of him, but Cas couldn’t help but to allow his desperation to get out of the hospital outweigh his own politeness. Castiel figured that he was at least owed a little bit of selfishness, as well as restlessness. And he knew Meg didn’t actually mind.

“Whoa,” Dean cautioned, rushing over when he spotted Cas’s great escape, and he easily took the weight that Meg couldn’t manage, nodding to her thankfully as she relinquished her grip. He pressed Cas close to his side and beamed over at him, making Cas’s chest warm comfortably, and Castiel’s lips curled into a bright, excited smile right back. “Ready to go, I take it?”

“Definitely,” Cas responded, leaning a little more into Dean than entirely necessary for a leg so close to healing and a back that wasn’t currently hurting, his hand curling into Dean’s shirt. Dean leaned over and pressed a kiss onto Cas’s temple in response, which just sent them both back into smiling like idiots.

They had both realized how easily they could have lost each other. Every single day, the realization was real, and it made Cas hold onto Dean a little tighter, and Dean was happy to grip right back. Cas had always loved Dean so fiercely, but he was suddenly so desperate to prove it. It was as if he wanted Dean to know he was the reason why he had hung on through all of the complications before he opened his eyes. But that wasn’t how things worked, and Castiel knew that.

But, somehow, in the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but to doubt.

Castiel wished one final goodbye to Meg and Garth, and the two of them stood in their spots and watched Dean help him through the doors and out into the cold air, sending a shiver through him, and Dean apologized softly as he pulled him the remaining few steps to the still-running Impala, and helped him into the passenger seat. Cas immediately reached over and buckled his seat belt, knowing from the police officers that had been on the scene that it was one of the factors that had saved him, and one of the reasons his siblings did not fair the same.

Cas wasn’t sure he would ever be able to sit in a car again without thinking about his siblings, and without thinking about the accident. He assumed that only time could tell and that, eventually, he would find out.

“Got everything?” Dean asked unnecessarily as he slumped into his own seat, closing the door behind him and snapping on the seat belt in the same motion, training his eyes on Cas, who nodded. “Alright. Home?”

Cas nodded again, and then leaned his head back on the seat, taking a deep breath and feeling the familiar hum of the Impala under his seat, the same hum of the stereo, the same reassuring breathing of Dean beside him, and he couldn’t help but to smile up at the ceiling when he confirmed in a soft voice, “Home.”

*

The puppy wasn’t the only hyperactive creature to burst through the door as Dean helped Castiel hobble up the front walk.

“Hello there, lovebirds,” Gabriel chirped, taking a large bite out of two Twix bars at once, skillfully and habitually moving out of the way as the puppy bounded forward excitedly, stumbling over its paws as it careened to Dean, hopping onto his legs. Dean reached down and mussed the puppy’s fur before the dog turned to look up at Cas with eyes like murky water, its tail wagging excitedly, and he wasted no time in assaulting him, as well.

“Careful, Benny,” Dean warned the puppy. Cas was entirely sure he saw the small husky roll its eyes, but knew Dean would never have believed him.

“I’m sure I’m a better homecoming present than a puppy,” Gabriel told his brother as he heaved himself up the porch steps, Dean keeping one hand at his back to steady him. “How does it feel to get your sea legs back, Ahab?”

“How long are you staying again?” Castiel demanded dryly, and Dean burst out laughing.

“Rude,” Gabriel remarked, jutting his chin up proudly. “One more week in my divine presence, little brother. And then I will be moving into a condo ten minutes away and you’ll never be able to get rid of me.”

Gabriel moved over to allow Cas enough room to get into the house, and Cas stepped into the foyer, careful to watch for the puppy bounding around at his and Dean’s feet. Castiel glanced around at the familiar space eagerly, nostalgically, and relaxed his shoulders as he let out a deep breath.

He and Dean had lived many days in this house, and it had felt like a million years since he had been here, even if it had only been about a month. He looked around the familiar gray-green walls, inhaling the scent of the Fluffy Towel candle that Dean loved to burn. Castiel slid off his jacket as he glanced around, looking at history untouched, and he reached for a hanger in the coat closet, securing his hand around one as he noticed familiar fabric that he hadn’t expected to see, his breath catching in his throat in surprise.

Gabriel was already deeper into the house, the living room by the sound of it, talking a mile a minute to the puppy who was, occasionally, barking back. Dean was hesitating beside him, not saying anything. Waiting for the reaction.

Castiel took a deep breath, and then let it out.

It wasn’t the same trench coat, of course—Castiel could tell by the lack of a frayed collar, no blue ink smudged on the shoulder, no threads hanging from the left sleeve. The original must have been ruined in the crash, probably torn and bloodied and nothing more than a rag. And Dean, he knew how much Cas had loved the jacket, so he had gotten him a brand new one.

A new jacket for a new start.

It should have felt like abandoning the old, like they were putting it behind them to forget, but even the nostalgia for what the past had been couldn’t ruin the warmth spreading through Castiel’s chest, because looking at the same material, the same cut, the same design—it alone took him back in time. It reminded him of wearing the overgrown jacket to high school; winning his first case with it folded onto the arm of his chair; wrapping Dean in the material when he had fallen asleep during that drive-in movie. It reminded him of pulling it on to the sound of Balthazar sitting on the horn out front, pausing at the door to turn a love note in between his fingers before tucking it into one of the pockets.

He knew he couldn’t let the past and the bad things that had happened destroy the new that would be made in its place, like it was a withered flower. He just had to pull the dying, broken part from the earth, and start anew, and let the flowers resonate with the memory of the ones that had been planted in the same place.

Dean didn’t say anything. Instead, he reached into the pocket of the trench coat, the same one that Castiel had put his note, and pulled another one out, and smiled at him shyly as he held it up for Castiel to read.

_Will you marry me?_

Castiel’s eyes widened, and they snapped to Dean’s face, almost disbelieving. Dean was smiling shyly, sheepishly, looking like he was ready to be let down the same way he was ready to accept that this would be one of the best moments of his life, and Castiel felt his chest constrict with something so different than grief, something so much purer than a heaven-bound soul, and he suddenly knew that, if he’d had to chose to stay, he had made the best decision of his life.

Castiel looked into Dean’s eyes, tears starting to roll down his face, and smiled.

Dean grinned like the sun breaking through a patch of dark clouds and laughed once, almost incredulously, like there was even an alternate reality out there where Cas would say no, and he bounded forward and threw his arms around Castiel and pressed their lips together, both of them smiling, and Dean murmured that he loved him into his skin, his hands tightening in his grip, never wanting to let go.

And Cas—Cas wanted nothing more than to stay, right there in Dean’s arms, for the rest of his life.

Despite everything that had happened, no matter how much he still hurt and how afraid he was that he would never be able to fully shake the ghosts that haunt him, Castiel got out of bed every single morning because he knew Dean would be there. He got dressed because he knew he would see Dean, and he smiled because Dean made him happy, and that was enough. That would always be enough. Castiel would walk through burning coals, barefoot, for Dean Winchester. He would fight the armies of Hell, fall from Heaven, become entranced with humanity, if it meant that he could always have the man with constellations on his face.

Castiel pressed kisses onto everywhere he could reach on Dean’s face and whispered with every single one of them, “I love you.”

Dean took Cas’s hands in his and brought them up to his face, and he kissed the knuckles, closing his eyes, and whispered like a prayer, “ _Cas_.”

“Aw, look at that,” Gabriel’s voice broke through their bubble of intimacy more effectively than a bucket of cold water, and Cas twisted in Dean’s arms to glance over at his brother, who was grinning at them toothily as he continued, loudly, “Surprise of all surprises, everyone, he said yes.”

There was a loud cheer from multiple familiar voices, and Castiel looked in surprise into the house, where Sam, Jess, and Inias—a child tucked in each arm—skittered out from behind the wall that blocked their sight from the kitchen, all of them grinning excitedly. Castiel blinked, slowly, before he turned to Dean for an explanation.

Dean just grinned at him.

“Deano here was having a complex before he left to pick your sorry ass up,” Gabriel informed Castiel inelegantly, filling him in as helpfully as he typically was. “He literally didn’t even decide how he was going to ask until he was about to walk out the door, and then he told everyone else to hide when you got back so they didn’t ruin the surprise.”

“Surprise!” Jess cheered helpfully, throwing her hands up.

Cas couldn’t help it—he started laughing.

“You’re unbelievable, you know that?” he asked Dean, shaking his head, smiling fondly. “Fucking ridiculous.”

“You love me,” Dean reminded him smugly, petulantly, proudly.

Castiel took his face in his hands and, in front of all of their family, kissed him right then and there.

“Ew, cooties,” Inias whined in a childish voice, making a show of turning the children away as to not corrupt them, and Alfie made a sound like laughter at his father’s theatrics, while Hester continued chewing on one of the strings hanging from Inias’s sweatshirt.

Castiel broke away with a laugh, shaking his head at them all, and he opened his mouth to say something just as he was taking a step, and then his bad leg gave out and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.

“Whoa there, champ,” Dean remarked as he caught Cas, hauling him back onto his unsteady feet. “Let’s sit you down, alright? All of my romantic has left you weak in the knees.”

Castiel lifted one hand, and flipped him off.

Dean winked back.

And everything was so real.

Castiel settled onto the couch with Dean on one side and Gabriel burrowing in on the other, after having been overpowered from squeezing in between them as he had intended, Gabriel and Castiel each holding an infant on their laps as Inias skidded back into the kitchen for something thicker than water for them to toast with, Sam and Jess cramming into a love seat beside them. The puppy curled up on the floor, leaning against both Cas and Dean’s feet. Castiel was surprised how quickly the dog had warmed up to him, never having met him in person until this moment.

A picture of Castiel, his mother, and all of his siblings sat on the mantel, where it always had. Castiel looked at it for a long moment, thankful that Dean hadn’t moved it or taken it down, because, even if all but two were gone, they were still there. In time and in history, in their hearts and their minds, they touched their lives and they held tight, and it would be rude to just remove them from something as simple as a spot of honor on the mantel, where it rested next to a picture of Dean and Sam, very young, with their parents, both of which having perished. It wasn’t their intention, but the focal point had become a sort of shrine, a memorial shining light on those they loved and lost and loved still, and Castiel was so thankful that even something as small as their memory could look down on this moment, joining with the family that continued to walk the earth, all of them coming together like cosmos morphing into galaxies.

Castiel leaned into Dean, so safe, so much at home, and he smiled.

This was home. This was family. This was love.

This was remembrance.

This was living.

And Castiel knew he could take on the world if it meant that all of these amazing people would be at his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> My tumblr: shortenedlanguage.tumblr.com
> 
> xo Slang

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you like it so far! I'll be updating every Monday until it's finished!
> 
> My tumblr: shortenedlanguage.tumblr.com
> 
> xo Slang


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